Bet you can't watch 5 minutes of this without having a trading breakthrough. - MUST BOOKMARK Mark Douglas gives a 2-hour masterclass on Trading Psychology. Watch this instead of Netflix over weekend.

In 1940, a beautifully dressed man walked into the cloakroom of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in Manhattan. He had a couple of drinks. He wrote a short note in a small leather notebook. Then he took out a pistol and ended his life. The note said, in his own broken words, that his life had been a failure. The strange part is who he was. This was Jesse Livermore. At one point, arguably the greatest trader who ever lived. A man who had made and lost more money than almost anyone of his era. To understand how someone like that ends up alone in a hotel cloakroom, you have to go all the way back to a farm. He was born in 1877 in rural Massachusetts. His father wanted him to work the land, like every man in the family before him. Jesse hated it. At fourteen, with five dollars his mother pressed into his hand, he ran. He walked out of that life and did not look back. He landed in Boston and took a job as a board boy at a brokerage. His entire job was to chalk stock prices onto a giant quotation board as they came in over the ticker. Numbers, all day, every day. Most boys saw noise. Jesse started to see something else. He noticed that prices moved in patterns. That a stock climbing hard would often pause, then continue. That certain behaviour repeated. He kept a little notebook of his predictions and checked them against reality. He was, without knowing the word for it, learning to read the tape. Then came the bucket shops. Bucket shops were not real exchanges. They were essentially betting parlours where you wagered on which way a stock would move, without ever owning it. Jesse walked in with his notebook and his instinct, and he started winning. And winning. And winning. He was so consistent, so young, and so deadly that the shops began banning him one by one. They literally could not afford to let him play. The papers gave him a name that stuck for life. The Boy Plunger. Flush with confidence, he moved to New York to trade on the real exchanges. And the real market humbled him almost immediately. In a bucket shop, the price you saw was the price you got. On a real exchange, there was delay, slippage, the gap between the quote and the fill. His whole edge had been built on speed and precision that no longer existed. He blew up. He borrowed, rebuilt, blew up again. This became the rhythm of his entire life. Rise, fall, rise, fall. Few people remember that Jesse Livermore went broke more than once. He just kept coming back. His first taste of legend came in 1907. The market was cracking. A full blown panic was setting in, banks were failing, credit was frozen. And Jesse, reading the tape the way he always had, had positioned himself short. As the market collapsed, his fortune exploded upward. On the worst days of that panic, he was making around a million dollars in a single session, which in 1907 was a staggering, almost obscene amount of money. The story goes that J. P. Morgan himself, trying to hold the entire financial system together, sent word asking Livermore to stop selling. And Jesse, sitting on his profits, covered his shorts and turned buyer. He walked away from that panic rich and feared. They started calling him the Great Bear of Wall Street. But the trade that carved his name into history came in 1929. While the rest of the country was drunk on a market that only went up, while shoeshine boys were giving stock tips, Jesse felt the tape turning. He began building enormous short positions, quietly, patiently. And when October 1929 arrived and the market fell off a cliff and took the American dream with it, Jesse Livermore was on the other side of it. He made around one hundred million dollars. Let that sit for a second. In the middle of the greatest financial catastrophe of the century, as families lost everything and men jumped from windows, one man had positioned himself perfectly. He became one of the richest men in the world overnight. He was also hated for it. He received death threats.