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After the war, Trader Livermore was hired to push Piggly Wiggly stock. He pushed it 52 points in a single day and cornered the market; the Stock Exchange had to set aside its rules and allow shorts five days to cover. In the 1925 wheat market ending with the Black Friday crash he bought grain in 5,000,000-bushel lots while the market was rising, turned bear at the top and sold 50,000,000 bushels short for an approximate profit of $10,000,000. Quietly sensing the end of a falling market in 1927, he bought Mexican Petroleum, pushed it up 75 points, suddenly went off on a vacation with another bull fortune in his pocket. Unable to get a lower berth on a Florida train, he chartered a special to take him from Palm Beach to Jacksonville.
As the bull market grew bigger, he barricaded himself and a staff of 20-odd in a suite of offices in Manhattan's Squibb Building overlooking Central Park. The nameless door was guarded by a plug-ugly who kept its key locked in a little green cabinet. No one could leave while the market was open; only outgoing telephone calls were allowed. Inside, like a grand croupier, sat Jesse Livermore, a bank of telephones at his elbow, his sharp blue eyes on his private board.
When the Coolidge market broke, there were angry stories that Trader Livermore had smashed it. It had, in fact, smashed him. He was short 20,000, long 80,000 shares. Three years later his second wife divorced him and married a onetime Prohibition agent. Later, to satisfy her debts, he sold his $1,350,000 estate at Great Neck, L. I. for $169,000. For his third wife, he took an Omaha, Neb. brewer's daughter, Mrs. Harriet Metz Noble, in 1933. A year later he was in bankruptcy —his fourth, for $2,259,000. At 56, he was back where he started at 16.
Jesse Livermore undoubtedly would have come back a fourth time and paid his debts if SEC hadn't changed the rules. By 1937 the market became too strictly regulated for operators of his type. Through all his market days he had never been a real market insider. He never learned that sometimes it was better to take stock than cash, better to get stock control of a business to tide a man over his old age. He was a trader, a gambler—one of the sharpest. When, last spring, he put his system down on paper and reopened his office to trade on commission for customers, it was a sign that he was through. No man who could make money for himself ever told the public how to do it.
The day after his visit to the Stork Club last week, Jesse Livermore turned up for lunch in the bar of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Tense, distraught, he took a table by himself, spoke to no one, from time to time took out a little memorandum book and jotted while he ate his lunch. Then he left. At 4:30 that afternoon he was back again. He ordered two old-fashioneds, sipped them slowly. Suddenly he rose from his table and went into the lobby. Ten minutes later an attendant found him slumped in a chair in the ground-floor men's room. At his feet was a 32-calibre automatic. Blood ran from the hole behind his ear. In the memorandum book police found an eight-page note to his wife. Over & over it repeated: "This is the only way out. ... I am tired of fighting. ... I am unworthy of your love. ... I am a failure."