There are a lot of hidden meanings in the book. His rise and fall show you 2 things. That money can be lost just as fast as it is made when you are a trader, and that money does not make you happy.
I can not believe how people are blinded to the genius of J.L.??? In a nutshell This man did not trade for wealth. He did not attempt to beat the market. He traded with the market in order to MASTER the market. Michael Jordan MASTERED basketball. That does not mean that the Chicago Bulls won every game. Einstein mastered science. That does not mean that he solved all scientific mysteries. J.L. mastered trading. That does not mean that he won every trade. The list goes on. You get the idea. No matter how good you are you can't win them all. Furthermore, if you deviate from the plan things can and will go wrong. J.L. made some mistakes that he did not have to make. He learned from those trading mistakes and was able to consistently make money. How many traders today started with nothing. Worked hard and saved money so that they could have a trading stake. Then turned that stake into a fortune? Then, lost the fortune only to make another one. Thus repeating this cycle over again and again. The fact that he made and lost fortunes is testimony that he did it once so he proved that he could do it again. Also, you have to remember that this was early on in the trading game back when you did not have electronic trading platforms and streaming realtime news and stock reports and historical data formats to plug into an excel spreadsheet. he did not have neuro networks and complicated algorithms running on his Windows EP. He had to do it all by hand. he could not log on to the web and look up Stockcharts.com and overlay MA's and stochastics. However, we have every advantage that he did not and we still can't make it happen. We have low margins where we can trade e-mini's for a few hundred dollars per contract. He had to have cash in hand. There were no mini sized contracts. There was no CNBC. No Squawk Box. No message boards or chat rooms. No E.T. We have relaxed trading laws. He had strict trading laws. We can learn a lot more from his past trading failures and mistakes than we can his trading successes. We have hind sight and understand his world better than he did back then. He had no knowledge of todays trading environment and did not have any hindsight. He is the greatest.
" he could not log on to the web and look up Stockcharts.com and overlay MA's and stochastics. However, we have every advantage that he did not and we still can't make it happen." Wrong approach! Wrong conclusion: You have NO advantage! Advantage over the other guy who has the same DELL computer with the same indicators running. Give me a break!
Let's get real here for a minute. Richard Dennis who actually turned a few thousand into a couple hundred million disagrees that Jesse was a good trader. Saves me a lot of wasted time debating the issue with myself. Time is money.
"The book never detailed how he lost each of his fortunes, although many signs indicate that he had very poor money management. If I recall right, he declared bankruptcy after losing his third fortune, and he was in debt about $2mil after his final loss. I believe he was only able to pay back about $800k, then committed suicide." This is a definition for success? You're better off reading a book by Donald Trump who managed to keep his money during a bad depression early nineties in New York real estate market and is now doing better than ever. Not all worthwhile concepts come from "trading books." He has a good chapter on pre-nups worth the price of the book IF you ever have anything worth taking away when you dump that old cow for a new younger beauty IF you make it.
My memory about him was not about broke, suicide, etc. It is about his exceptional talent, his power play, his influence on the market and the respect from Wall Street toward him. He mentioned that a speculator needs four elements to succeed, a MEMO (Memory, Experience, Mathematics and Observation. I think today successful traders possess those four elements plus the fifth element, Money Management. Where the first four elements are for Offensive and the last element is for Defensive.
I still use his "pivots points" strategy. With RSI it is a very strong indicator. Thanks Jesse... It worked back then, it works 80 years later. Beautiful!!! Before you ask, on the Nasdaq 1 min chart there were 2 bottoms this morning. I think Jesse called them turnover and confirmation points. After that the Nasdaq rallied 20 points....
Perhaps you are not a successful trader so excuse me if I ruffled your feathers a bit. You are misunderstanding the point. The point is that WE have access to information that he did not. WE have access to technology that he did not. Just because you have 2 people with the the same computer and charting sofware does not indicate equality in experience nor does it even the odds. One trader wins and the other trader loses. If that were not the case then everyone would win consistantly and there would be more successes than failures. You obviously just don't get it????