I think one of the aspects of the stock market that attracts me most is the fact that I don’t have to be a genius to make money from it. More important than being the smartest man in the room is to find a system of rules that work and be loyal to it.
That simple 2-step process has built fortunes on Wall Street. For one man named Jesse Livermore, it actually built him separate fortunes on different occasions!
His secret was his set of rules, and after studying Mr. Livermore at great length, it’s time to reveal how he made millions…and how YOU can copy him…
Known as the “Great Bear of Wall Street” and “Boy Plunger,” Livermore became famous for building multi-million dollar fortunes in the first half of the 1900s. His nicknames came from the fact that he had the special skill of rapidly making money when the market was falling.
But he didn’t have some elusive secret, and he didn’t have a special talent that you and I don’t possess. Instead, he learned very early that having strict, specific rules (and the discipline to follow them) could make him incredibly wealthy by way of the stock market.
Now, I could spend hours writing about each and every one of his rules, what they all mean, and how to use them to make money yourself, but I think the more efficient way to give you the only advantage Livermore ever had is to focus on the 2 most important rules, and I’ll do so by employing a couple of quotes from the book about Livermore, “Reminiscences of a Stock operator:”
“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.”
This rule goes against human nature itself, but as Livermore is proof of, it can build you a fortune. If you buy 2 stocks and immediately see one go up 5% and one go down 5%, what will you do?
Human nature tells you to hold onto the loser because you want to wait for it to return to break even. In contrast, human nature will tell you to sell the winner so that you can take the money and count the trade as a victory.
But if you want to build your wealth, you should do the exact opposite. Even if you make 10 trades with 7 losers and 3 winners, you can still make a great amount of money if you close the losers right away at small losses and ride the winners as far as you can to rip out huge profits.
And then comes Livermore’s second rule…
“I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realised 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.”
Don’t try to outwit the market – that will bankrupt you. Instead, let the market show you what it’s doing, and use it to propel you to your fortune.
Rather than fixating on the short-term swings of the market, look at the overriding trend of the entire market, and follow it. If you can do that, you’ll soon find that it’s actually more difficult to lose money than to make it!
Livermore used these 2 rules to build his stock market fortune, I’m using them to build mine, and now it’s your turn to build your own fortune…
