Jesse Livermore: The Most Significant Events In The 1920's

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Throughout all of my years in history class the 1920’s have always been one of the most fascinating decades to learn about. The decade did not gain its nickname “The Roaring Twenties” by being drab and lifeless the whole time. Its stereotypical vibrant culture and exuberant parties can identify the period, however, the end of it marked one of the most devastating times America has ever known: the crashing of the stock market. In order to thoroughly cover the subject Klein introduces the reader to a multitude of important figures, which help better explain what exactly happened from an array of perspectives. Klein first introduces the readers to Charles E. Mitchell or “Sunshine Charley” who was the president of National City Bank. As a successful …show more content…

Livermore was “the son of a failed Massachusetts farmer, he found work at 14 as a board boy in a Boston brokerage for $6 a week” (Klein 63). His early head start in the world of finance opened him up to many possibilities as he started to recognize patterns and fluctuations of figures. This helped him be able to predict the moves they would make, which would become a very convenient skill. At the early age of fifteen he started getting banned from bucket shops for excessive winning. At the age of twenty-one he moved to New York to bring his education of “the game” to another level. Within the first six months of being there he went broke then later traveled to St. Louis with nothing more than $500 borrowed from a friendly broker. He later returned to New York with $2,800 aspiring to resume his career. These men and all of the others are important to the novel because it better explains what kind of men were involved in the financial industry, which was merely men of every kind. In order to be successful you did not need to come from a rich family with a well-rounded education. You simply needed drive, which was the common denominator between all of these men. The market to an extent required luck and capability of loss, which ultimately many of these men were exposed to later when the market

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