Author: Edwin Lefevre



TODAY, Edwin Lefèvre is best remembered
for his classic work, Reminiscences of a Stock
Operator. Reminiscences was one of Lefèvre’s
later works, his penultimate one to be exact,
published in 1923. Wall Street Stories was
Lefèvre’s 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 Lefèvre’s 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 Lefèvre’s
books. Reminiscences was a fictionalized biography of
Jesse Livermore. Lefèvre 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 Lefèvre was
a pseudonym for Livermore. I’m not sure if this misconception
persists today, but it is easy to see how
it first arose.

Personally speaking, Lefèvre 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 today’s
markets.” My goal and my hope was to write a book
that would emulate the spirit of Lefèvre’s 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 Lefèvre’s other works—
this volume of Wall Street Stories—from “out-of-print”
oblivion and helping to bring it to modern readers.