Excerpt from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
The following is an excerpt from Jesse Livermore’s “Reminiscensces of a Stock Operator,” which is available in our public domain library.
One day one of the office boys — he was older than I came to me where I was eating my lunch and asked me on the quiet if I
had any money.
“Why do you want to know?” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I’ve got a dandy tip on Burlington. I’m going to play it if I can get somebody to go in with me.”
“How do you mean, play it?” I asked. To me the only people who played or could play tips were the customers old jiggers with oodles of dough. Why, it cost hundreds, even thousands of dollars, to get into the game. It was like owning your private carriage and having a coachman who wore a silk hat.
“That’s what I mean; play it 1″ he said. “How much you got.
“How much you need?”
“Well, I can trade in five shares by putting up $5.”
“How are you going to play it?”
“I’m going to buy all the Burlington the bucket shop will let me carry with the money I give him for margin,” he said.
“It’s going up sure. It’s like picking up money. We’ll double ours in a jiffy.”
“Hold on!” I said to him, and pulled out my little dope book. I wasn’t interested in doubling my money, but in his saying that Burlington was going up. If it was, my notebook ought to show it. I looked. Sure enough, Burlington, according to my figuring, was acting as it usually did before it went up. I had never bought or sold anything in my life, and I never gambled with the other boys. But all I could see was that this was a grand chance to test the accuracy of my work, of my hobby. It struck me at once that if my dope didn’t work in practice there was nothing in the theory of it to interest anybody. So I gave him all I had, and with our pooled resources he went to one of the nearby bucket shops and bought some Burlington. Two days later we cashed in. I made a profit Of $3.12.
The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing
Financial Statement Analysis: A Practitioner's Guide, 3rd Edition
Managing Investment Portfolios: A Dynamic Process (CFA Institute Investment Series)
