Tired of Fighting

Money & Markets · New York, 1929–1940 · Jesse Livermore

TL;DR: Jesse Livermore shorted the 1929 crash and, by the widely reported figure, made around $100 million while the country broke. America blamed him for it. Eleven years later he died broke by his own hand, leaving a note that said he was tired of fighting.

What actually happened

Livermore had made and lost fortunes since the bucket shops of the 1890s; 1929 was his masterpiece, and the hate mail and bodyguards followed. But the discipline that made the trade never governed the rest of his life: the estates, the yachts, the repeated bankruptcies.

By 1934 he was bankrupt again; in 1940, in the cloakroom of the Sherry-Netherland hotel, he shot himself. His suicide note, and the New York Times' accounting of liabilities exceeding assets, closed the ledger on the man whose trading rules are still quoted by people who skip his ending.

The play to remember

Edge in the market and edge over yourself are different assets. Livermore had only one, and the episode is honest about which.

Sources & fact flags: NYT obituary (Nov 1940); Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (as stylized memoir, flagged); the $100M figure noted as varying by source.

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