Jesse Livermore Quotes

We must become more comfortable with probability and uncertainty.

Accepting trial and error means accepting error. It means taking problems in our stride when a decision doesn't work out, whether through luck or misjudgment. And that is not something human brains seem to be able to do without a struggle.

All men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes.

Statistics may be defined as "a body of methods for making wise decisions in the face of uncertainty.

All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.

Lord, deliver me from the man who never makes a mistake, and also from the man who makes the same mistake twice.

Know when to tune out, if you listen to too much advice you may wind up making other peoples mistakes.

All you need do is listen to very smart people and sift out the ideas that are unworthy or implausible, and I wouldn't pretend for a moment that I hadn't made lots of mistakes and there are companies, perhaps, that we had been investors in.

But to us, probability is the very guide of life.

The fellow who never makes a mistake takes his orders from one who does.

Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.

Poker is a skill game pretending to be a chance game.

Experience is what enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

No matter what they think; they are sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong; their judgment is a mere lottery.

Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities.

Relying on luck … does not constitute a policy.

I'm always trying to calculate the mathematical probability of certain outcomes.

It's okay to make mistakes, as long as you don't make them again.

Investing is a probabilistic business. Every once in a while, it's sort of like you're throwing six-sided dice, and anything except a one or a two, you're doing well. Statistically speaking, you throw the dice enough times, you're going to throw a one or a two five times in a row, and you're going to look pretty foolish, right?

He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors-though never the same error more than once-is more reliable than someone who has never made any.

There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not-and few of them do-are playing a game of chance.

Common sense is the guy who tells you that you ought to have had your brakes relined last week before you smashed a front end this week. Common sense is the Monday morning quarterback who could have won the ball game if he had been on the team. But he never is. He's high up in the stands with a flask on his hip. Common sense is the little man in a grey suit who never makes a mistake in addition. But it's always someone else's money he's adding up.

Whatever way uncertainty is approached, probability is the only sound way to think about it.

In mathematics, as in physics, so much depends on chance, on a propitious moment.

To get anywhere, or even to live a long time, a man has to guess, and guess right, over and over again, without enough data for a logical answer.