<i>"I posted this on another Livermore thread a while back.....
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Quote from Pabst:
Several of the post's on this thread are the most asinine, judgmental BS I've read in many a moon. Someone's going to say with a straight face that a high school dropout quote boy who parlayed a few dollars into at one point perhaps nine figures, wasn't talented? LMFAO."</i>
I don't know if anyone ever said Livermore wasn't talented... that's irrelevant. As a trader, he sucked. He sucked dirty canal water as a trader.
Nothing Livermore did was remarkable... same stuff has been done by literally 1,000s of traders and gamblers for eons. There are traders in the market right now building bankrolls off non-repeatable circumstance. Same is true for card players in Vegas. What's that prove? Can they keep what they have or more importantly, repeat the process?
If not, they are merely victims of circumstance, nothing more. A successful trader by any reasonable definition does not rely on crooked schemes and manipulation of situations. Those events are not duplicatable.
If Livermore had quit early, he still wouldn't have been a great trader. He would have been a great robber baron by definition.
I've said this in other threads, too: Livermore may have been the finest person to ever breathe air. May have helped widows & orphans in all his spare time. As a person, he may have been wonderful.
As a trader of financial securities using superior skills on a level playing field? He ate horse s(tuff) and called it filet mignon.
His posthumous biography is compiled of quotes others thought they recalled him saying. How much of that was manufactered by other writers (the author?) long past his burial?
Talented? Yes. Great trader? No.