I’ve been digging through the archives and came across this old post with a fun piece from Paul Tudor Jones, who wrote the foreword to the new edition of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator …:
The interview is priceless.
Must read.
“There are two rules from this book by which I now live during these later stages of my constitution. First is the tenet “The trend is your friend,” which is repeated often – but not often enough. You sill simply never make any money unless you begin and end every trading thought with that in mind. Second is the old adage actually popularized in the 1880s, as I learned in your annotations: “Sell down to the sleeping point”.
Probably the best lessons to be learned from this book come from his (Lefevre’s) repeated failures and how he dealt with them. In the book I think he lost his entire fortune four or five times. I did the same thing but was fortunate enough to do it all in my early twenties on very small stakes of capital….I think it’s no great coincidence that our greatest champions, our greatest artists, our greatest leaders, our greatest everything all seem to have experienced some kind of gut wrenching loss.”
