Jesse Livermore, Boy Plunger: The Man Who Sold America Short in 1929 - Tapa dura

Jesse Livermore, was the most successful stock trader that ever operated. Singlehandedly he caused the two great Wall Street crashes of 1907 and 1929, making millions from both. Briefly in the early 1930s he was one of the world’s richest men with a personal fortune believed to be worth over $150 million. It was too extreme a change of fortunes and Livermore shot himself in a New York hotel lobby in 1940 aged just 63.

Tom Rubython is best known as the author of Life of Senna, the definitive biography of Brazilian race driver Ayrton Senna. Life of Senna has become the biggest-selling third party biography of a racing driver, with 100,000 copies sold. Six years after its publication, it still sells over 8,000 copies a year. Before beginning as a biographer, Rubython was well known in the world of magazine publishing, spanning the worlds of sport and business. Aside from his work in Formula One, he has been a specialist business writer for thirty years. In business, he is the former editor of BusinessAge, EuroBusiness and Spectator Business. In sport, he has edited F1 Magazine, BusinessF1 and SportsPro. Rubython now specializes in non-fiction storytelling. He is passionate and methodical about the process of writing and researching the definitive biography. Starting out with a determination to tell the full story of a person’s life, he emphasizes what is important and de-emphasizes what is not; the crucial tools of any biographer.

Paul Tudor Jones’ connection with Jesse Livermore began when he started his career in finance at Livermore’s first broker, E.F. Hutton at the age of 26. Shortly afterwards he founded his own investment firm, the Tudor Investment Corporation. He became a student of Livermore and resolved that every new employee be handed a copy of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, the fictional biography of Livermore, on their first day at work. His study of Livermore’s methods paid off in 1987 when he was able to predict Black Monday on 19th October 1987. Employing exactly the same short strategies as Livermore did in 1907 and 1929 he is said to have tripled his net worth that day. He never looked back and by 2014 his firm had over $14 billion under management. He has consistently made money for himself and his clients so much so that Forbes magazine rated him the 345th richest man in the world in its 2014 wealth rankings. Nowadays he devotes as much of his time to philanthropy as making money for himself running the highly successful Robin Hood Foundation. He started it to give money away himself and encourage other successful fund managers to do so as well. The Foundation is unique in that 100% of donations are spent on good causes. Fortune magazine called it: “one of the most innovative and influential philanthropic organizations of our time.”