Jesse Livermore Quotes

Numerous academic studies have shown that amateur investors make poor traders - buying stocks for the wrong reasons, holding losers for too long, and acting on whims and emotions.

The three traits speculators must learn to manage within themselves are confidence, fear, and aggressiveness.

Success in investing doesn't correlate with I.Q. once you're above the level of 25. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.

For most people, attaining the intellectual clarity and emotional detachment that investing requires is tough.

Ocean rowing is very much what you make it. Rowing technique is pretty irrelevant on the ocean. It's the psychology that's important.

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.

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

Never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down.

Mary Joe Fernandez rarely has a bad loss. She never tries for stupid shots.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

He who keeps his cool best wins.

In the world of money and investing, you must learn to control your emotions.

You have to be okay with wins and losses. You can't just be looking for the wins and, when the losses happen, you can't buy more and more because you're sure it's going to bounce. We call that revenge trading.

When it comes to investing, you are your own worst enemy.

No one can be patient who is not independent.

The only way I know to get out of disappointment is to work hard, keep doing the right things, and don't make any rash decisions.

Being an instinctive player is great but there's time in the past where I've let how I'm playing at the time affect me, thinking I can play some big shots and I'd be alright.

I think there's a lot of trust in being selectively aggressive I guess. Looking for your pitch you can drive, but not swinging if it's not there and not worrying about, 'Oh no, I'm down 0-2.' I feel as comfortable as I do at 0-0. I don't know.

It's human nature: for most investors, the pain of stocks going down is more tangible than the joy of when they go up. The common impulse is to do something - anything - to minimise the pain.

Wall Street is littered with the bones of those who knew just what to do, but could not bring themselves to do it.

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.

Most investors want to do today what they should have done yesterday.

Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy only when others are fearful.

Investing isn't about beating others at their game. It's about controlling yourself at your own game.

A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they've got terrible temperaments. And that is why we say that having a certain kind of temperament is more important than brains. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control. You need patience and discipline and an ability to take losses and adversity without going crazy. You need an ability to not be driven crazy by extreme success