Jesse Livermore Cornered Cotton

In 1891, a boy named Jesse Livermore ran away from home with his mother’s blessing after his father pulled him out of school, and he started working in Boston posting stock quotes for $5 a week. By age 15, he had already made his first market profit, and over the next decades he built a reputation for reading price movements so well that he became one of Wall Street’s most famous speculators. After World War I, Livermore secretly cornered the U.S. cotton market, and President Woodrow Wilson summoned him to the White House after the Secretary of Agriculture warned that the move could drive prices dangerously higher. Livermore agreed to unwind the position at break-even, and years later, during the 1929 crash, he made about $100 million, even though he eventually lost that fortune and died with debts greater than his assets.

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