Having just added a post about Edward Jerome Dies’ book Street Of Adventure, I thought I’d finish writing about him by reproducing the preface he wrote for Livermore’s How To Trade In Stocks – The Livermore Formula for Combining Time Element and Price.
Dies’ preface from 1940 is as follows:
The career of Jesse L. Livermore is a bright patch in the pattern of speculation. He has been in the public eye as a stock-market factor almost continuously since as a youth he flashed like a comet across the speculative skies and became known as the millionaire Boy Plunger.
He has indeed been a plunger, and on rare occasions the magnitude of his operations cause The Street to blink in wonderment. Yet blind chance never entered into his market sallies. Each move was touched with singular genius, buttressed by endless research and the dogged patience of Griselda.
For forty years Jesse Livermore has studied world and domestic economic conditions with almost fanatic intensity. In the same four decades he has studied, talked, dreamed, lived with, and traded in the speculative markets. His world has been the movement of prices; his science the correct anticipation of such movements.
It has been my privilege to know personally some of the great speculators of our times and to observe at close range their fascination activities. For intellectual scope and for natural aptitude I regard Jesse Livermore as the greatest speculator and market analyst since the turn of the century. In one of my books I made the statement that he could be shorn of every dollar, given a small brokerage credit, locked in a room with several tickers, and in the course of a few market months he could emerge with a new fortune. Such is the mark of his genius.
He created his first sensation when he was fifteen years old. His mother was the party most surprised, for he dumped into he lap a thousand dollars in five dollar bills, his first gleanings from the stock market.
He created his next sensation by completing four years of mathematics in a single year while holding a job as a board marker in a brokerage house.
He has been creating market sensations ever since and to those interested in the science of speculations this little book, if not a sensation, is at least a surprising departure.
The reason is obvious. Every great speculator has his own method of operation, his own course of study for arriving at conclusions upon which he is willing to risk vast sums of money. Such methods are guarded like state secrets, sometimes through vanity or suspicion, but more often for very practical reasons.
So when Jesse Livermore, with characteristic frankness, draws back the curtain and reveals publicly his rules for combining time element and prices he takes the spotlight for audacity among the top-flight speculators of the age. He lays before the reader the fruits of forty years of speculative study.
It is a new chapter in the colorful saga of a brilliant operator.