Jesse Livermore Quotes

Averaging Buys/Sells: “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.”
Discipline: “The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight.”
Price Action: “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.”
Stock Picks/Following People: “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.”
Cutting Losses: “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.”
Timing: “It isn’t as important to buy as cheap as possible as it is to buy at the right time.”
Being Right: “There is only one side of the market and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.”
Stocks Not Acting Right: “If a stock doesn’t act right don’t touch it; because, being unable to tell precisely what is wrong, you cannot tell which way it is going. No diagnosis, no prognosis. No prognosis, no profit.”
Stock Tips: “I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or series of tips that will make money for me than my own judgement.”
Not Taking It Personally: “Getting sore at the market doesn’t get you anywhere.”
Learning Curve: “It took me five years to learn to play the game intelligently enough to make big money when I was right.”
Self-Confidence: “A man must believe in himself and his judgement if he expects to make a living at this game.”
Hard Money: “People who look for easy money invariable pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth.”
Importance of a Plan: “My plan of trading was sound enough and won oftener that it lost. If I had stuck to it I’d have been right perhaps as often as seven out of ten times.”
Lesson Learned: “It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all his mistakes.”
Waiting for Opportunities: “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.”
Intuition: “I knew something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it exactly. But if something was coming and I didn’t know where from, I couldn’t be on my guard against it. That being the case I’d better be out of the market.”
More on Sitting: “The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regular wages.”
Daily Personal Struggle: “A stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies within himself.”
Pain is Good: “If I hadn’t made money some of the time I might have acquired market wisdom quicker.”
Blowing Up: “There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!”
Physically and Mentally Fit: “I couldn’t afford anything that kept me from feeling physically and mentally fit. Even now I am usually in bed by ten. As a young man I never kept late hours, because I could not do business properly on insufficient sleep.”
Accept Responsibility: “The customers, who were all eager to be shoved and forced into doing things so as to lay the blame for failure on others…”
Greed: “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.”
Taking Breaks: “I can always give up trading to play, unless of course it is an exceptionally active market in which my commitments are rather heavy.”