Jesse Livermore Quotes

226 Jesse Livermore Quotes (Jesse Lauriston Livermore)

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[Prices] are never too high to begin buying or too low to begin selling.
Jesse Livermore

I did exactly the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit.
Jesse Livermore

I noticed that in advances as well as declines, stock prices were apt to show certain habits, so to speak.
Jesse Livermore

I learned early 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. I’ve never forgotten that.
Jesse Livermore

I’d go during my lunch house and buy or sell – it never made any difference to me. I was playing a system and not a favourite stock or backing opinions.
Jesse Livermore

I had a hard time convincing her [my mother] that I was not gambling, but making money by figuring.
Jesse Livermore

I knew something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it exactly. But if something was coming and I didn’t know where from, I couldn’t be on my guard against it. That being the case I’d better be out of the market.
Jesse Livermore

In the old days whenever a bucket shop found itself loaded with too many bulls on a certain stock it was common practice to get some broker to wash down the price of that particular stock far enough to wipe out all the customers that were long of it. This seldom cost the bucket shop more than a couple of points on a few hundred shares, and they made thousands of dollars.
Jesse Livermore

I didn’t always win. My plan of trading was sound enough and won oftener than it lost. If I had stuck to it I’d have been right perhaps as often as seven out of ten times.
Jesse Livermore

I always made money when I was sure I was right before I began.
Jesse Livermore



What beat me was not having brains enough to stick to my own game – that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favoured my play.
Jesse Livermore

There is a time for all things, but I didn’t know it. And that is precisely what beats so many men in Wall Street who are very far from being in the main sucker class. There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No many can always have adequate reasons for buying and selling stocks daily – or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.
Jesse Livermore

Whenever I read the tape by the light of experience I made money, but when I made a fool play I had to lose. I was no exception was I?
Jesse Livermore

In a bucket shop where your margin is a shoestring you don’t play for long pulls. You are wiped too easily and quickly.
Jesse Livermore

The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money everyday, as though they were working for regular wages.
Jesse Livermore

I did not know then what I learned later, what made me fifteen years later, wait two long weeks and see a stock on which I was very bullish go up thirty points before I felt that it was safe to buy it. I was broke and was trying to get back, and so I waited. That was in 1915.
Jesse Livermore

A stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies within himself.
Jesse Livermore

I always looked young. It was a handicap in some ways but it compelled me to fight for my own because so many tried to take advantage of my youth. The chaps at the bucket shops seeing what a kid I was, always thought I was a fool for luck and that that was the only reason why I beat them so often.
Jesse Livermore

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all his mistakes.
Jesse Livermore

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.
Jesse Livermore



With me I must back my opinions with money. My losses have taught me that I must not begin to advance until I am sure I shall not have to retreat. But if I cannot advance I do not move at all. I do not mean by this that a man should not limit his losses when he is wrong. He should. But that should not breed indecision.
Jesse Livermore

All my life I have made mistakes, but in losing money I have gained experience and accumulated a lot of valuable don’ts. I have been flat broke several times, but my loss has never been a total loss. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here now. I always knew I would have another chance and that I would not make the same mistake a second time. I believed in myself.
Jesse Livermore

A man must believe in himself and his judgement if he expects to make a living at this game. That is why I don’t believe in tips.
Jesse Livermore

If I buy stocks on Smith’s tip I must sell those same stocks on Smith’s tip. I am depending on him. Suppose Smith is away on a holiday when the selling time comes around? No sir, nobody can make big money on what someone else tells him.
Jesse Livermore

I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or a series of tips that will make more money for me than my own judgement.
Jesse Livermore

It took me five years to learn to play the game intelligently enough to make big money when I was right.
Jesse Livermore

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.
Jesse Livermore

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.
Jesse Livermore

The game taught me the game. And it didn’t spare the rod while teaching.
Jesse Livermore

If somebody had told me my method would not work I nevertheless would have tried it out to make sure for myself, for when I am wrong only one thing convinces me of it, and that is to lose money. And I am only right when I make money. That is speculating.
Jesse Livermore



I bought a hundred at 84. I got out at 85 in less than a half hour.
Jesse Livermore

I knew of course, there must be a limit to the advances and an end to the crazy buying of A. O. T – Any Old Thing – and I got bearish. But every time I sold I lost money, and if it hadn’t been that I ran darn quick I ‘d have lost a heap more.
Jesse Livermore

Everything happened as I had foreseen. I was dead right and – I lost every cent I had. I was wiped out by something that was unusual.
Jesse Livermore

I did worse than not see it, I kept on trading, in and out, regardless of the execution. You see, I never could trade with a limit. I must take my chances with the market. That is what I am trying to beat – the market, not the particular price.
Jesse Livermore

When I think I should sell, I sell. When I think stocks will go up, I buy. My adherence to that general principle of speculation saved me.
Jesse Livermore

I can’t tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way.
Jesse Livermore

If I hadn’t made money some of the time I might have acquired market wisdom quicker.
Jesse Livermore

My winnings were not quite enough to offset both my losses and my living expenses.
Jesse Livermore

I didn’t keep on trading the way I did through stubbornness. I simply wasn’t able to state my own problem to myself, and of course, it was utterly hopeless to try to solve it.
Jesse Livermore

I had been trading since my fourteenth year. I had made my first thousand dollars when I was a kid of fifteen, and my first ten thousand before I was twenty-one. I had made and lost a ten thousand dollar stake more than once. In New York I had made thousands and lost them. I got up to fifty thousand dollars and two days later that went. I had no other business and knew no other game. After several years I was back where I began. No – worse, for I had acquired habits and a style of living that required money; though that part didn’t bother me as much as being wrong so consistently.
Jesse Livermore



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