George Edwin Henry Lefèvre was born on January 23, 1871, in Colón, Colombia (now the Republic of Panama). He made his living inside the Wall Street he later wrote about: as a financial journalist for the New York Sun, as a stockbroker, and as a fiction writer whose short stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. His native Panama even appointed him ambassador to Spain and Italy in 1909. Lefèvre understood the machinery of markets from the inside, and he wrote about it the way he had watched it happen.
In the early 1920s he spent months in extended interviews with Jesse Livermore, the era’s most famous stock operator, then turning down the volume of fact and turning up the narrative until the result read like a first-person confession. The twelve resulting articles ran in the Saturday Evening Post in 1922 and 1923 and were collected in book form as Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923, George H. Doran). The narrator calls himself Larry Livingston; nobody has ever doubted that the voice is Livermore’s and the pen is Lefèvre’s. The book has never been out of print since, and nearly everything worth repeating about speculation on Wall Street entered the language through it.
Lefèvre died in 1943. He wrote novels and other Wall Street books — Wall Street Stories (1901), a collection of exchange-floor fiction, and The Making of a Stockbroker (1925), a factual life of broker John K. Wing — but one book made his name permanent. He is the rare writer whose most quoted lines belong to someone else’s voice, delivered so faithfully that a century of traders quote them without ever noticing the man who wrote them down.
Core Ideas
- The tape is the argument. Prices are the only facts in the room. Arguing with them, hoping at them, resenting them — none of it moves a decimal. Lefèvre’s narrator fights his battles against his own reactions, never against the quotation.
- Sitting makes the money. The big money was never made by clever thinking but by patience: buying right, then staying put while the position worked. Thinking without sitting is noise; sitting without thinking is luck.
- Speculation has no new tricks. Nothing is new in Wall Street because speculation is as old as the hills. Every generation rediscovers the same cycles, the same panics, the same rationalizations — and repeats them anyway.
- There is only one side: the right side. Bullish or bearish is a disposition, not a strategy. The operator who must be one or the other has a religion where he needs a method.
- Believe in yourself or take up another trade. Tips, predictions, and borrowed convictions fail at the first drawdown. The man who makes his living at the game must trust his own judgment, or someone else’s fear will spend his capital.
Quotes
The quotes below are the voice of Larry Livingston, Lefèvre’s fictionalized Jesse Livermore, from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923).
“There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“There is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“A man must believe in himself and his judgment if he expects to make a living at this game.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“But the average man doesn’t wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“If I buy stocks on Smith’s tip I must sell those same stocks on Smith’s tip.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesn’t get you anywhere.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
“Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.”
— Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923)
Books by Edwin Lefèvre
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (1923) — the Wiley paperback reprint of the 1923 classic, the fictionalized memoir of Jesse Livermore built from Lefèvre’s extended interviews. The most quoted book about speculation ever written; it sits on this site’s book shelf twice, here and on Livermore’s page, because both men own it.
Wall Street Stories (1901) — Lefèvre’s earlier collection of exchange-floor fiction, written while he worked the financial beat. The McGraw-Hill reprint keeps the turn-of-the-century bucket-shop world alive, manipulation and all.
The Making of a Stockbroker (1925) — the factual counterpart to Reminiscences: a life of Boston broker John K. Wing told in the same reportorial style. The Kessinger reprint is the way in print.
Browse all 8 Edwin Lefèvre quotes in the Quote Library.
