Jesse Lauriston Livermore Quotes

After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.

To anticipate the market is to gamble.

To be patient and react only when the market gives the signal is to speculate.

Don't take action with a trade until the market, itself, confirms your opinion.

Being a little late in a trade is insurance that your opinion is correct. In other words, don't be an impatient trader.

Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.

The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight.

A prudent speculator never argues with the tape. Markets are never wrong, opinions often are.

Disregarding the big swing and trying to jump in and out was fatal to me.

Nobody can catch all the fluctuations. In a bull market your game is to buy and hold until you believe that the bull market is near its end. To do this you must study general conditions and not tips or special factors affecting individual stocks.

The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market.

What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn't even wish to have to think.

Remember this: When you are doing nothing, those speculators who feel they must trade day in and day out, are laying the foundation for your next venture. You will reap benefits from their mistakes.

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 judgment.

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.

It is foolhardy to make a second trade, if your first trade shows you a loss.

Never average losses. Let this thought be written indelibly upon your mind.

When I'm bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don't buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on a scale up.

Without faith in his own judgment no man can go very far in this game.

That is about all I have learned - to study general conditions, to take a position and stick to it. I can wait without a twinge of impatience. I can see a setback without being shaken, knowing that it is only temporary.

There is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side

He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.

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.

If a man is both wise and lucky, he will not make the same mistake twice. But he will make any one of ten thousand brothers or cousins of the original.

People who look for easy money invariable pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth.

A market does not culminate in one grand blaze of glory. Neither does it end with a sudden reversal of form. A market can and does often cease to be a bull market long before prices generally begin to break.

A loss never bothers me after I take it. I forget it overnight. But being wrong - not taking the loss - that is what does damage to the pocketbook and to the soul.

It isn't a hunch but the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind, at work. That is the mind which makes artists do things without their knowing how they came to do them. Perhaps with me it was the cumulative effect of a lot of little things individually insignificant but collectively powerful.

I cannot fear to be wrong because I never think I'm wrong until I am proven wrong. In fact, I am uncomfortable unless I am capitalizing my experience.

At long as a stock is acting right, and the market is right, do not be in a hurry to take profits. One should never permit speculative ventures to run into investments.

If you can't sleep at night because of your stock market position, then you have gone too far. If this is the case, then sell your position down to the sleeping level.

Instead of hoping he must fear and instead of fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit.

A man must study general conditions, to seize them so as to be able to anticipate probabilities.

I never argue with the tape. To be angry at the market because it unexpectedly or even illogically goes against you is like getting mad at your lungs because you have pneumonia.

I never hesitate to tell a man that I am bullish or bearish. But I do not tell people to buy or sell any particular stock. In a bear market all stocks go down and in a bull market they go up.

Professional traders have always had some system or other based upon their experience and governed either by their attitude towards speculation or by their desires.

"I can't sleep" answered the nervous one. "Why not?" asked the friend. "I am carrying so much cotton that I can't sleep thinking about. It is wearing me out. What can I do?" "Sell down to the sleeping point", answered the friend.

I did precisely 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.

They say you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market. Where I should have made twenty thousand dollars I made two thousand. That was what conservatism did for me.

I have always played a lone hand. It is the way my mind works. I have to do my own seeing and my own thinking. But I can tell you that after the market began to go my way I felt for the first time in my life that I had allies - the strongest and truest in the world: underlying conditions. They were helping me with all their might.

Trends come like a series of ocean waves, bringing the high tide when things are good and, as conditions recede, the low tide appears. These trends come unexpectedly, unpredictably, and they have to be weathered with temperance, poise, and patience- good or bad.

I don't know whether I make myself plain, but I never lose my temper over the stock market. I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesn't get you anywhere.

The price pattern reminds you that every movement of importance is but a repetition of similar price movements, that just as soon as you can familiarize yourself with the actions of the past, you will be able to anticipate and act correctly and profitably upon forthcoming movements.

Most people, whether bull or bear, when they are right, are right for the wrong reason, in my opinion.

For instance, let us say that a new stock has been listed in the last two or three years and its high was 20, or any other figure, and that such a price was made two or three years ago. If something favorable happens in connection with the company, and the stock starts upward, usually it is safe play to buy the minute it touches a brand new high.

I was utterly free of speculative prejudices. The bear side doesn't appeal to me any more than the bull side, or vice versa. My one steadfast prejudice is against being wrong.

If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn't be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It's the guessing that develops a man's brain power.

"On Pat Hearne - He made money in stocks, and that made people ask him for advice. He would never give any. If they asked him point-blank for his opinion about the wisdom of their commitments he used a favorite race-track maxim of his: "You can't tell till you bet.""

Ignorance at twenty-two isn't a structural defect.

In a narrow market, when prices are not getting anywhere to speak of but move within a narrow range, there is no sense in trying to anticipate what the next big movement is going to be. The thing to do is to watch the market, read the tape to determine the limits of the get nowhere prices, and make up your mind that you will not take an interest until the prices breaks through the limit in either direction.

Money is made by sitting, not trading.

It is what people actually did in the stock market that counted - not what they said they were going to do.

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.

There are times when you should be completely out of the market, for emotional as well as economic reasons.