Edwin Lefèvre - Wall Street Stories: Introduction by Jack Schwager: Introduction by Jack Schwager

WALL

STREET

STORIES

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WALL

STREET

STORIES

EDWIN LEFVRE

Introduction by Jack Schwager

McGraw-Hill

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Copyright 2008 by Edwin Lefvre. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 0-07-164157-2

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DOI: 10.1036/0071544844

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TODAY, Edwin Lefvre is best remembered for his classic work, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Reminiscences was one of Lefvres later works, his penultimate one to be exact, published in 1923. Wall Street Stories was Lefvres first book and preceded Reminiscences by 22 years.The same writing skills and insights into the psychology of trading that have made Reminiscences a timeless financial work were already well developed in this much earlier volume. A review in the New York Sun put it succinctly:

It is the one book about Wall Street that hits the mark ...

For those who are curious,the original selling price was $1.25.

Although all of Lefvres financial books are works of fiction, they are almost invariably based on real personalities, often thinly disguised.In fact,in his day,it was a bit of a parlor game for Wall Street professionals to attach the real names to the characters in Lefvres

v

books.Reminiscences was a fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore. Lefvre did such a remarkable job of capturing the mind-set of the professional trader and the eternal truths of trading that I recall,when I first read the book nearly 25 years ago, many readers at the time mistakenly believed that Lefvre was a pseudonym for Livermore.Im not sure if this misconception persists today, but it is easy to see how it first arose.

Personally speaking, Lefvre provided me with a goal when I wrote my first Market Wizards book. I clearly recall thinking in reference to Reminiscences, Here I am reading this book 60 years after it was written, and it still rings absolutely true in todays markets. My goal and my hope was to write a book that would emulate the spirit of Lefvres work in maintaining truth and relevance many years after it was written.In this sense,I feel indebtedness to this financial writer of an earlier age who served as a personal inspiration.I am therefore quite pleased to play a role in sparing one of Lefvres other works this volume of Wall Street Storiesfrom out-of-print oblivion and helping to bring it to modern readers.

HOW THIS CAME TO BE

After fending off repeated requests for a lunch meeting from McGraw-Hill editor Jeanne Glasser because I could not consider any proposal for writing another book given my work-related time constraints,I finally gave in to her unflagging persistence. During lunch,the topic of influential books came up and I mentioned the role Reminiscences had played in my own earlier work. You know, I told Jeanne, Lefvre wrote a number of other books besides Reminiscences. In fact, I read another one of his books,Wall Street Stories,a number of years ago,and I recall that it was actually quite good. You might want to consider reissuing it. That was enough for Jeanne to do some research and discover the book had gone out of print and to quickly set this project into motion.

Although Lefvres career as a writer was the fulfillment of a long-held desireby his teens he already knew he wanted to be a writer and he never changed his mindhis role as one of the foremost chroniclers of the markets and the mind of the trader was a position he came to by chance. To please his father,who said he could pursue his writing ambitions as long as he had a career that provided a moneymaking occupation, Lefvre studied mining engineering at Lehigh University. Lefvre clearly had little interest in engineering. He withdrew after three years to take a job as a reporter for the New York Sun. Seven years later, while trying to sell stories in New York City to realize his ambition to become a writer, he ran into a friend who was a financial editor.This chance meeting led to a job writing stock reports and financial news.