24 Facts About Jesse Livermore

Jesse Lauriston Livermore was an American stock trader.

Jesse Livermore is considered a pioneer of day trading and was the basis for the main character of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, a best-selling book by Edwin Lefevre.

At one time, Livermore was one of the richest people in the world; however, at the time of his suicide, he had liabilities greater than his assets.

Jesse Livermore's principles, including the effects of emotion on trading, continue to be studied.

Jesse Livermore was born in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to a poverty-stricken family and moved to Acton, Massachusetts, as a child.

Jesse Livermore learned to read and write at the age of three-and-a-half.

At the age of 14, his father pulled him out of school to help with the farm; however, with his mother's blessing, Jesse Livermore ran away from home.

At the age of 16, he quit his job, began trading full-time, and from 1893 to 1894, Jesse Livermore, nicknamed by fellow traders "The Boy Plunger", was earning about $200 per week at the bucket shops in Boston, much more than his salary at Paine Webber.

Jesse Livermore brought $1,000 home to his mother to repay the $5 she had given him before running away, however she disapproved of his "gambling"; he countered that he was not gambling, but "speculating".

Some time later, Jesse Livermore went long on the stock; however, his friend, and owner of the brokerage house in which he did most of his trading, Edward Francis Hutton, erroneously convinced Jesse Livermore to close his position, and he wound up losing $40,000.

Jesse Livermore agreed and instead, profited from the rebound, boosting his net worth to $3 million.

Jesse Livermore bought a $200,000 yacht, a rail car, and an apartment on the Upper West Side.

Jesse Livermore went bankrupt but was able to recover all of his losses.

Jesse Livermore agreed to sell back the cotton at break-even, thus preventing a troublesome rise in the price of cotton.

Jesse Livermore was suspended as a member of the Chicago Board of Trade on March 7,1934.

Jesse Livermore enjoyed fishing and, in 1937, he caught a 486-pound swordfish.

Jesse Livermore married his first wife, Netit Jordan, of Indianapolis, at the age of 23 in October 1900.

The couple had two sons: Jesse Livermore II, born in 1919 and Paul, born in 1922.

Jesse Livermore then bought an expensive house in Great Neck and let his wife spend as much as she wanted on the furnishings.

In 1931, Dorothy Jesse Livermore filed for divorce and took up temporary residence in Reno, Nevada, with her new lover, James Walter Longcope.

Jesse Livermore retained custody of their two sons and received a $10 million settlement.

Dorothy sold the house in Great Neck, on which Jesse Livermore spent $3.5 million, for $222,000.

Jesse Livermore was Metz Noble's fifth husband; at least two of Metz's previous husbands had committed suicide, including Warren Noble, who hanged himself after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

On Thanksgiving day, November 28,1940, just after 5:30 pm, Jesse Livermore fatally shot himself with a Colt automatic pistol in the cloakroom of The Sherry-Netherland hotel in Manhattan, where he usually had cocktails.