Evil Diaries: A Trip Down Memory Lane

Jesse Livermore, arguably one of the greatest stock market traders of all time, was born in 1880 about 50 miles outside Boston. His father, a smallholder, seems to have been a fairly uninspiring fellow. But his mother gave him a few dollars and he hitched a lift into Boston aged just fifteen. Here he deployed his astonishing memory and sense of numbers to great effect.

His affairs fluctuated and probably because he was a manic depressive he went close to bust on three occasions before committing suicide in the Sherry Netherlands hotel in Manhattan in 1940.

He never wrote a biography but Edwin Lefevre, who trained as a mining engineer when a young man but then turned to journalism, interviewed Livermore but referred to him in the resultant book, Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator, as Larry Livingston.

Some of the English deployed is a bit unclear but the persistent tale is one of great achievement by Livermore. This is £15 well spent at Amazon.

*****

Capita (CPI) reported last week and duly fell 20%. And then over the weekend the SunTel reported a claim by a buyer of a CPI business that the licences required and warranted by CPI were unsound. This is a pity since I keep on expecting CPI to leap clear and show a clean pair of heels. It does not.

*****

Mark Watson-Mitchell has drawn his readers’ attention to a small cap, Transense Technology (TRT), which has dashed promises for twenty+ years. However, it seems that at very long last TRT is getting somewhere. Mark highlights this. At 92p TRT might be very cheap.

*****

Finally, in last weekend’s Spectator, Andrew Kenny, an engineer by profession, reports on the depressing rise of Julius Malema in South Africa. His Economic Freedom Fighters party promises nothing but death to the prospects of South Africa and yet still garners an increasing share of votes. The truth is that the ANC has descended into a morass of non-stop corruption and bribery and cares so little about being observed doing so that all South Africans can see that this is so. Ramaphosa has stolen far more than Zuma did.

South Africa is uninvestable.