The Making of a Stockbroker

buy it...read it...enjoy it...do it...nuff said...period!

Enjoyable tale about the rise of a junior clerk through the ranks until he heads a stock brokerage firm. The tale overlaps in time and subject matter with most other Lefevre books but is less focused on specifics of trading and more focused on the story (a bit like Samson Rock of Wall Street in that respect). Chapter 6 (pp. 57-66) has some wonderful trading stories--the book is worth it for those alone. I read it cover-to-cover in on sitting (flying from London to SF). If you long for Jay Gould ('J.G.! J.G.!'), the floor of the NYSE, the Lusitania Break, the Panic of 1907, the brass ticker, physical scrip, and the story of a timber man from Bangor Maine who becomes a brokerage clerk in Boston and then rises to head a brokerage firm in Wall Street, then this book is for you. He also discusses the bomb that left those still visible blast holes in the old JPM building at Wall and Broad. I've touched those holes, been to Bangor (where many Vietnam vets arrived home), lived in Boston, stood on the floor of the NYSE and walked down Wall Street many times, so hearing about all these things 75 years past was an interesting walk down memory lane. The book does place a little too much emphasis on the high moral character of the brokerage industry, but its pluses far outweigh its minuses. Cheap at twice the price.

This book is not a second part of Livington's Reminiscences, although the author is the same, but a different viewpoint over the same problems, anxieties and hopes that affect the market players. The book don't has market strategies, but this biography of a stockbroker can help us to understand a bit of the market's psicology and how the brokers see the trader's behaviour. Althought it had been written seventy five years ago, the people that work in the market today seems to react in the same manner that the old ones. It's a agreeable reading, but not recommended to people that look for market strategies similar to those found in Livingston's Reminiscences.