Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)

Summary

Transcriber’s Note Table of Contents created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain. Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain. REMINISCENCES OF A STOCK OPERATOR REMINISCENCES OF A STOCK OPERATOR By Edwin Lefevre with a new Introduction by Benton W. Davis American Research Council · Larchmont, New York Copyright by George H. Doran Company All Rights Reserved Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 64-23364 Printed in the United States of America To Jesse Lauriston Livermore CONTENTS I1 I went to work when I was just out of grammar school. I got a job as quotation-board boy in a stock-brokerage office. I was quick at figures. At school I did three years of arithmetic in one. I was particularly good at mental arithmetic. As quotation-board boy I posted the numbers on the big board in the customers’ room. One of the customers usually sat by the ticker and called out the prices. They couldn’t come too fast for me. I have always remembered figures. No trouble at all. There were plenty of other employes in that office. Of course I made friends with the other fellows, but the work I did, if the market was active, kept me too busy from ten A.M. to three P.M. to let me do much talking. I don’t care for it, anyhow, during business hours. But a busy market did not keep me from thinking about the work. Those quotations did not represent prices of stocks to me, so many dollars per share. They were numbers. Of course, they meant something. They were always changing. It was all I had to be interested in—the changes. Why did they change? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I didn’t think about that. I simply saw that they changed. That was all I had to think about five hours every day and two on Saturdays: that they were always changing. That is how I first came to be interested in the behaviour of prices. I had a very good memory for figures. I could remember in detail how the prices had acted on the pr...