Some inspiring and educational quotes by Jesse Livermore (from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator)

1) And when the market goes your way you become fearful that the next
day will take away your profit, and you get out-too soon. Fear keeps you
from making as much money as you ought to. The successful trader has to
fight these two deep-seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might
call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of
fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much
bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit. It is
absolutely wrong to gamble in stocks the way the average man does."

2) I have been in the speculative game ever since I was fourteen. It is
all I have ever done. I think I know what I am talking about. And the
conclusion that I have reached after nearly thirty years of constant
trading, both on a shoestring and with millions of dollars back of me,
is this: A man may beat a stock or a group at a certain time, but no man
living can beat the stock market! A man may make money out of
individual deals in cotton or grain, but no man can beat the cotton
market or the grain market.

3) I have long since learned, as all should learn, not to make excuses when wrong. Just admit it and try
to profit by it. The Market Tells Traders When They Are Wrong: The
market will tell the speculator when he is wrong, because he is losing
money. When he first realized he is wrong is the time to clear out, take
his losses, try to keep smiling, study the record to determine the
cause of his error, and await the next big opportunity. It is the net
result over a period of time in which he is interested.

4) A lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street.
There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever
happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen
again

5) I think the clearest summing up of the whole thing was expressed by Thomas F. Woodlock when he declared: "The principles of
successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people
will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in
the past.".

6) It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything.
But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull
side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that
general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more
technical phases of the game of stock speculation.

7) I didn't have as many interesting experiences as you might imagine. I mean, the
process of learning how to speculate does not seem very dramatic at this
distance. I went broke several times, and that is never pleasant, but
the way I lost money is the way everybody loses money who loses money in
Wall Street. Speculation is a hard and trying business, and a
speculator must be on the job all the time or he'll soon have no job to
be on.

8) There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do.

9) And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you
begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin
to learn!

10) Slow as my progress seems now, I suppose I learned as fast as I possibly could, considering that I was making money
on balance. If I had lost oftener perhaps it might have spurred me to
more continuous study. I certainly would have had more mistakes to spot.
But I am not sure of the exact value of losing, for if I had lost more I
would have lacked the money to test out the improvements in my methods
of trading.

11) And right here let me say one thing: After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions
of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made
the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting
tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find
lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets.
I've known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began
buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should
show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine
that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right
and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to
learn. But it is only after a stock operator has firmly grasped this
that he can make big money. It is literally true that millions come
easier to a trader after he knows how to trade than hundreds did in the
days of his ignorance.

12) One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth or the
first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. They have
cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to
build a concrete highway across the continent.

13) Without faith in his own judgment no man can go very far in this game. That is
about all I have learned to study general conditions, to take a position
and stick to it. I can wait without a twinge of impatience.

14) To learn that a man can make foolish plays for no reason whatever
was a valuable lesson. It cost me millions to learn that another
dangerous enemy to a trader is his susceptibility to the urgings of a
magnetic personality when plausibly expressed by a brilliant mind. It
has always seemed to me, however, that I might have learned my lesson
quite as well if the cost had been only one million. But Fate does not
always let you fix the tuition fee. She delivers the educational wallop
and presents her own bill, knowing you have to pay it, no matter what
the amount may be. Having learned what folly I was capable of I closed
that particular incident.
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