....Reminiscences of a Stock Operator? Why not Reminiscences of a Stock Trader? OR Reminiscences of a Scalper? OR Reminiscences of a Day Trader? I am just curious. Pension_Admin
I'll give it a shot. A word has both definition and connotation. Definition is what is written in a dictionary, connotation is what we really mean when we use it. Operator, strangely enough, has retained its neutrality over the years: telephone operator, machine operator, etc. I cannot think of any negative connoation attached to the word. In hindsight, the author chose a very good word. But inside the book, the author used the word speculator a lot. It seems to me he liked the word speculator because it described accurately the nature of what Jesse did. However, he also understood the negative connoation of the word. The negative connotations of a word have forced people to move to different words, though the definitions of the old and new words are the same. For example, negro to black to African-American, sales to marketing, secretary to administration specialist, salesman to account executive, etc. Sometimes the connotations of a word change, for example, Japanese car (cheap plastic to reliable), geek, and, of course, day trader (broke to rich).
4DTrader, thank you for the explanation, but I am still wondering why he didn't choose Reminiscences of a Trader instead? "Trader" seems like a neutral word. Pension_Admin
Because Jesse Livermore was a stock operator. One of his principal business areas was running the operations of stock pools. Jeese Livermore made money any way he could and running stocks pools, both bull and bear, was one of the best ways to do it.
I am not sure the word trader was popular one hundred years ago. If you consider how stocks were bought and sold at that time: through your broker, or a guy behind the counter at the bucket shop. Frankly, there was little "trading" on the part of the stock player, unlike today when we do everything by ourselves on the Internet. It seems the word trader entered our vocabulary with the advent of Internet Trading.
I always wondered why it wasn't Reminiscences of a covertible risk arb trader or Reminiscences of global macro event driven risk manager.............(which is exactly what he was) Read the book You do understand that everything was completely different 100 years ago in this country right? Including language - for the most part? Read the book
You can read old news articles about Jesse Livermore and his operations at the New York Times online archive. For example - headlines and fisrt paragraph: LEWISOHNS CANCEL LIVERMORE ORDERS; Seneca Copper Drops to 18 , Low for This Year, After Pool Disagreement. FIRM REFUSED TO CLEAR Operator and Stock Exchange House at Odds Over Interpretation of Agreement. January 20, 1922, Friday Section: Business & Finance, Page 26, 577 words The cancellation of orders placed by Jesse L. Livermore for the purchase of Seneca copper stock for the account of Lewisohn Brothers, led up to charges of violation of a pool agreement concerning which both sides issued statements yesterday, as did a Stock Exchange firm involved.