[/QUOTE] I agree those type of opportunities won't come again, but Thorpe is a freakin' genius, not a "pretty talented guy." The odds of someone cracking the code of blackjack, roulette (including building a wearable computer in the early 1960s) and the options market is astounding....more so than the trend-followers/Turtles (though Seykota is super sharp) or Soros (a miscreant worshipped my fellow miscreants like piehole).
He was literally more competent than the average bean counter the casinos hired. At that point they really didn't consider computers that useful. At the end of the day he dedicated considerable effort (no more effort than your average enthusiast in anything) to beating casinos games because it was interesting to him. In hindsight, its hard to consider anyone with access to a PDP-10 and unlimited hours a "genius". Especially in the 80s when you rented blocks of hours from MIT/Stanford/Berkeley to do compute tasks at an exorbitant rate. Blackjack is trivially solvable (within Thorpes means) using a computer. It was only "hard" to absolute ignoramuses, which is how Thorpe got his edge. He wasn't an idiot in a sea full of idiots. His wearable computer "idea" was actually the idea of an actual genius, Claude Shannon, who's genius is so immeasurably great compared to Thorpe it would be almost insulting to Computer Science and Mathematics to compare the two. When I went through my years in Computer Science and Mathematics, Claude Shannon was mentioned many times and Ed Thorpe not even once. We should reflect on that as an indicator of who really ran the show in the hey-day of Thorpe. No one really remembers the guy responsible for "Compact Linear Operators in Normed Spaces". Thorpe is very talented as a hedge fund manager, he's no where near genius by any stretch of the modern usage of the word. If anything he's an above average MIT mathematician who had a really cool story about how he got ahead of the casinos at their own game. He bumped into a few actual geniuses, co-opted their work, and succeeded against immeasurable odds in the markets. Literally any master level mathematician or physicist could've stumbled upon what he discovered given sufficient interest. I'm sorry. I read his entire book. The first part where he has one over the casinos is great. His adventures in the market are as vanilla as he is. It's far too easy to romanticize heroes. Given what we know, very few of these traders are actually as impressive as they appear to be. Especially given that Thorpe is certainly embellishing his past given the people who got him there are long dead.
If that's the case, it's pretty dumb to commit suicide when you've still got money left. His suicide note stating "I am tired of fighting. Can't carry on any longer..." If he's just tired of "fighting" why didn't he just take a break from trading when he was losing money like the rest of us when we are in a losing streak or just simply retire? No, it was because he lost everything again for the 3rd time. He had $100 million before he went into cotton trading and was betrayed by his "friend", another cotton trader who, along with other cotton growers, traded against him and he lost all of $100 million that he had. He declared bankruptcy for the 3rd time and plus SEC was being created at that time so he knew he wouldn't be able to trade like before and make his fortune back. He was penniless that's why he chose to kill himself. Would I consider Jesse Livermore a great trader? Probably wouldn't. He made large fortunes yes but the way he traded, he was making all the mistakes that an inexperienced trader would make, traded on hunches with no systematic trading system, no risk or money management in place, won big but eventually gave all back to the market, listening to others blindly instead of doing analysis on his own and sticking to it. There is a saying in trading that really should define what makes a great trade: It's not how much you make at the end of the day that counts; it's how much you get to KEEP that counts. And I think this applies exactly to Jesse Livermore. Yeah he made great fortune but he didn't end up keeping any.
I think it was because of his family problems which eventually resulted in him killing himself. He was a known womanizer and changed wives many times. His wives mostly were after his money obviously and his children from previous marriages weren't exactly in terms with the new wife. He probably felt very lonely and old. Combined that with losing a lot of his fortune at one go it was too much for him to handle probably. Previously he had the youth, talent and vigor to win back his losses. But at 63 yo, he was a tad too old and his mental health was declining so much that he eventually gave up everything.
Not his last wife who actually came with money and it was her who actually supported him after he lost everything. All in all, he was just not a very good trader. A good trader always always always has to have a solid system or some reasonable rationale for placing a trade. Jesse Livermore seems to place trades just out of hunches and then he's easily swayed by others.
I still think you have to give someone who turned essentially almost nothing to a billion all by trading alone some credit. How many people can do that?
Lol. How can you compare trading from nothing to a billion to a lottery winner. It is impossible to trade to a billion just by blind luck.
Idiot. Bad traders don't live in a lifetime of luxury based on their trading record. Not to mention he shorted 2 of the biggest crashes... Anybody who can live as a trader for 4 decades is a very good trader. If you live in luxury, you are an excellent, one of a kind... OK, we have found the guy who never heard of depression...
Try late 1950s and early 60s. If you're off by a few decades, and still don't get his genius of applied math (something his theoretical buddies never thought about) in three separate areas, I can't help much. No offense, but with the amount of hindsight bias in your post, it's little wonder so few people do well in the markets.