Jesse Livermore – The Search for the Truth with the Anonymous Master

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:04)
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:24)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:49)
This week I have a very special guest, years in the making. Like another favorite episode with anonymous guest Modest Proposal, this conversation is with one of the stars of the financial Twitter universe who writes anonymously and goes by the pseudonym Jesse Livermore. I met Jesse six years ago after reading his unbelievable unique investing research which tackled all the big and interesting issues in markets. He now also works with me as a research partner at OSAM where he's used our data to continue his search for truth in markets.
Despite being one of the brightest minds I've encountered, he's also as humble and unassuming as they come.
I'm at least a slightly better person because of trying to emulate how he conducts himself.
I get to have many conversations with him that go from to 100 fast, and I'm thrilled to be able to share one of those with you. So Jesse, this is a long time coming. People are going to be excited for this one. My favorite of these conversations are often with people that are anonymous on Twitter. And you've got an interesting reason for being anonymous. We won't go into it, obviously. I'll start by saying you're not in the field of investing professionally, and yet many consider you to be, I certainly do, maybe one of the most thoughtful investing thinkers out there. So tell us your sort of investing origin story. How did you get interested in this topic, given that it's not what you do professionally, and what has fostered that interest and that love?

**Jesse Livermore** (2:04)
It all started for me in probably the late 1990s when I was in college.
I dabbled in some of what was going on in the tech bubble, lost some money, made some money.
And that started my interest in investing as a hobby. I ended up, when I got out of college, around 9-11, joining the military.
And I spent five years in the military. When I got out of the military, I went to grad school. I was trying to become a physicist. And that was around 2007 to 2009 time frame. And that really sucked me in, in terms of all the things that were happening. And it really became interesting to me, more interesting than what I was doing. And then I started trading on my own very aggressively during that period. I had a lot of time during the day, a lot of free time, because in grad school, you can make your own schedule if you get your work done.
And then I had some successes, especially when the market turned in 2009 I started getting really, really interested, really enjoying the activity of it. The way that it brings all different disciplines together in a way that physics really doesn't. And so I end up taking a job in STEM just to make more money to be able to trade. That's kind of where I've been since. It all happened very slowly, the blog and everything, because it started out, I was just on Twitter having debates with people and having fun conversations. Over time, I started to learn from Twitter, like learn a lot from really, really smart people. I know that's probably been your experience as well.
And I think it was it was Josh Brown, actually, who had basically told me, he gave me the advice that, you know, there's a lot of really good content on my feed, I should probably make a blog out of it. And I started doing that and started making posts and just grew from there. And then this is around 2012, 2013 timeframe. And then, you know, I started really getting into it and enjoying it. I always enjoyed writing.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:34)
We've talked a lot about how deep you'll go. I know last night at dinner, we were talking about you going through this crazy dense accounting textbook lately. And so you'll kind of topic by topic build up expertise or a toolkit in a subdiscipline, let's say, underneath investing. I'm curious how you first came to it. So when you were first trading or investing, what were the instruments that interested you? Was it equities? Was it bonds? Was it options?