En af de største tradere i historien var Jesse Livermore. Check min anmeldelse af hans bog her Reminiscenses of a Stock Operator.
En god ven sendte mig forleden denne samling af citater. Enjoy!
Jesse Livermore:
- Money cannot consistently be made trading every day or every week during the year. Do not trade every day of every year. Trade only when the market is clearly bullish or bearish. Trade in the direction of the general market. If it’s rising you should be long, if it’s falling you should be short.
- Speculation is far too exciting. Most people who speculate hound the brokerage offices… the ticker is always on their minds. They are so engrossed with the minor ups and downs, they miss the big movements
- It was only after going broke twice and then making much less profit in a raging bull market than he would have expected to that Livermore realized he was trading like a sucker. He was losing his profit because he was trading every day for the sake of trading. This, he realized, made him a “Wall Street Fool”. “Whenever I read the tape by the light of experience I made money, but when I made a plain fool play I had to lose. There was the huge quotation board staring me in the face, and the ticker going on and people trading and watching their tickets turn into cash or into waste paper. Of course I let the craving for excitement get the better of my judgment.” After he had learned to trade less, Jesse Livermore’s profits soared.
- 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 was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
- Play the market only when all factors are in your favor. No person can play the market all the time and win. There are times when you should be completely out of the market, for emotional as well as economic reasons
- I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realized at last that when old Mr. Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” 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.
- Big movements take time to develop.
- Obviously the thing to do was to be bullish in a bull market and bearish in a bear market.
- 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 the game is to buy and hold until you believe the bull market is near its end.
- It is the change in the major trend that hurts most speculators.
- Do not be invested in the market all the time. There are many times when I have been completely in cash, especially when I was unsure of the direction of the market and waiting for a confirmation of the next move
- Never average losses.
- Never meet a margin call – get out of the trade.
- And right here let me say one thing: 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 is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I’ve known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine that is, they made no real money out of it. 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 literally true that millions come easier to a trader after he knows how to trade than hundreds did in the days of his ignorance.
- 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.
- The only thing to do when a person is wrong is to be right, by ceasing to be wrong. Cut your losses quickly, without hesitation. Don’t waste time. When a stock moves below a mental-stop, sell it immediately.
- The human side of every person is the greatest enemy of the average investor or speculator.
- Nothing new ever occurs in the business of speculating or investing in securities and commodities. All through time, people have basically acted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. This is why the numerical formations and patterns recur on a constant basis.
- The game does not change and neither does human nature.
- There is nothing new on Wall Street or in stock speculation. What has happened in the past will happen again, and again, and again. This is because human nature does not change, and it is human emotion, solidly build into human nature, that always gets in the way of human intelligence. Of this I am sure.
- The speculator’s deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statue books in the world and all the rule books on all the Exchanges of the earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.
- I believe that uncontrolled basic emotions are the true and deadly enemy of the speculator; that hope, fear, and greed are always present, sitting on the edge of the psyche, waiting on the sidelines, waiting to jump into the action, plow into the game.
- Greed, fear, impatience, and hope will all fight for mental dominance over the speculator.
- Emotional control is the most essential factor in playing the market. Never lose control of your emotions when the market moves against you. Don’t get too confident over your wins or too despondent over your losses.
- The unsuccessful investor is best friends with hope, and hope skips along lifes path hand in hand with greed when it comes to the stock market. Once a stock trade is entered, hope springs to life. It is human nature to be positive, to hope for the best. Hope is an important survival technique. But hope, like its stock market cousins ignorance, greed, and fear, distorts reason. See the stock market only deals in facts, in reality, in reason, and the stock market is never wrong. Traders are wrong. Like the spinning of a roulette wheel, the little black ball tells the final outcome, not greed, fear or hope. The result is objective and final, with no appeal.
- The speculator’s chief enemies are always boring from within. It is inseparable from human nature to hope and to fear. In speculation, when the market goes against you, you hope that every day will be the last day-and you lose more than you should had you not listened to hope. And when the market goes your way you become fearful that the next day will take away your profit, and you get out-too soon.
- Fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to. The successful trader has to fight these two deep-seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; 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.
- I believe that having the discipline to follow your rules is essential. Without specific, clear, and tested rules, speculators do not have any real chance of success. Why? Because speculators without a plan are like a general without a strategy, and therefore without an actionable battle plan. Speculators without a single clear plan can only act and react, act and react, to the slings and arrows of stock market misfortune, until they are defeated.
- The only way you get a real education in the market is to invest cash, track your trade, and study your mistakes…It is emotionally difficult to review your mistakes, since the speculator must wade through his own bad trades and blunders. And these are not simple blunders; these are blunders that cost money. Anyone who has lost money by investing poorly knows how difficult it is to reexamine what occurred. The examination of a losing trade is tortuous but necessary to ensure that it will not happen again.
- The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor. 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.
- Take your losses quickly and don’t brood about them. Try to learn from them, but mistakes are as inevitable as death.
- Successful trading is always an emotional battle for the speculator, not an intelligent battle.
- Wishful thinking must be banished.
- Every once in a while you must go to cash, take a break, take a vacation. Don’t try to play the market all the time. It can’t be done, too tough on the emotions.
- Don’t trust your own opinion and back your judgment until the action of the market itself confirms your opinion.
- Markets are never wrong – opinions often are.
- It is not good to be too curious about all the reasons behind price movements.
- Every stock is like a human being: it has a personality, a distinctive personality. Aggressive, reserved, hyper, high-strung, volatile, boring, direct, logical, predictable, unpredictable. I often studied stocks like I would study people; after a while their reactions to certain circumstances become more predictable.
- Co-ordinate your trading activity with pivot points. Only enter a trade after the action of the market confirms your opinion and then enter promptly. Whenever I have had the patience to wait for the market to arrive at what I call a Pivotal Point before I started to trade; I have always made money in my operations http://www.jesse-livermore.com/price-patterns.html
- I become a buyer as soon as a stock makes a new high on its movement after having had a normal reaction.
- I never benefited much from a move if I did not get in at somewhere near the beginning of the move. And the reason is that I missed the backlog of profit which is very necessary to provide the courage and patience to sit through a move until the end comes – and to stay through any minor reactions or rallies which were bound to occur from time to time before the movement had completed its course.
- Provided this pattern is repeated, it is safe to stick with a trade. If there should be a deviation from the pattern, it is a warning sign. If the pattern fails and the price moves against the trend by more than a little, it is a sign to exit your trade and preserve your profit.
- The last gasp of heavy volume provides a great opportunity to sell out any illiquid large holdings. I knew it was foolish to ever catch the tops or the bottoms of the moves. It is always better to sell large holdings into an advancing market when there is plenty of volume. The same is true on the short side; you are best to cover the short position after a steep, fast decline.
- Buy rising stocks and sell falling stocks. The trend is your friend.
- Continue with trades that show you a profit, end trades that show a loss.
- 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.
- The highest profits are made in trades that show a profit right from the start.
- Go long when stocks reach a new high. Sell short when they reach a new low.
- End trades when it is clear that the trend you are profiting from is over.
- Don’t worry about catching tops or bottoms, that’s fools play.
- The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight. Old Turkey was dead right in doing and saying what he did. He had not only the courage of his convictions but also the intelligence and patience to sit tight.
- I never try to predict or anticipate. I only try to react to what the market is telling me by its behavior.
- Don’t become an involuntary investor by holding onto stocks whose price has fallen.
- A stock is never too high to buy and never too low to short.
- No trading rules will deliver a profit 100 percent of the time.
- It is much easier to watch a few stocks than many.
- In any sector, trade the leading stock – the one showing the strongest trend.
- Watch the market leaders, the stocks that have led the charge upward in a bull market. That is where the action is and where the money is to be made. As the leaders go, so goes the entire market. If you cannot make money in the leaders, you are not going to make money in the stock market. Watching the leaders keeps your universe of stocks limited, focused, and more easily controlled.
- Do not become completely bearish or bullish on the whole market because one stock in some particular group has plainly reversed its course from the general trend.
- Few people ever make money on tips. Beware of inside information. If there was easy money lying around, no one would be forcing it into your pocket.
- Observation, experience, memory and mathematics – these are what the successful trader must depend on. He must not only observe accurately but remember at all times what he has observed. He cannot bet on the unreasonable or on the unexpected, however strong his personal convictions may be about man’s unreasonableness or however certain he may feel that the unexpected happens very frequently. He must bet always on probabilities – that is, try to anticipate them. Years of practice at the game, of constant study, of always remembering, enable the trader to act on the instant when the unexpected happens as well as when the expected comes to pass.
- Hunches and the mysterious ticker-sense haven’t so very much to do with success.
- The Market Tells Traders When They Are Wrong: The market will tell the speculator when he is wrong, because he is losing money. When he first realized he is wrong is the time to clear out, take his losses, try to keep smiling, study the record to determine the cause of his error, and await the next big opportunity. It is the net result over a period of time in which he is interested.
- “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.