Jesse Livermore

Jesse Lauriston Livermore is one of the most storied speculators in market history. Starting as a teenager posting quotes in a Boston brokerage, he learned to read the tape so well he was banned from the "bucket shops" and earned the nickname the Boy Plunger.

His name became legend through two calls: shorting the market into the Panic of 1907, and again into the Crash of 1929, the latter reportedly making him around $100 million. His trading principles, cutting losses, adding to winners, respecting the primary trend, and the psychology of speculation, were immortalized in Edwin Lefevre's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, still one of the most read trading books ever written.

His life was also a cautionary tale of extremes: fortunes made and fully lost more than once. Livermore remains the archetype of the pure speculator, brilliant, disciplined on the tape, and endlessly human off it.