Lessons that survived every market
A small collection of trading principles that have held up across decades, attributed to the people who actually wrote or said them — with the source, and with the parts the retelling usually leaves out.
Trading has more folklore than almost any other field. Quotes get attached to whoever sounds most impressive, anecdotes acquire round numbers, and a trader who blew up twice becomes a man who never lost.
The rule for this section is simple: only documented facts and sourced quotes. No invented dialogue, no "he must have thought", no myth-polishing. Where the legend and the record disagree, the record goes on the page — including the endings that are not inspiring.
Principles
Ideas first. The people who articulated them come second.
Survival is the only strategy that compounds
The single idea every long-surviving trader converges on, and the arithmetic that makes it inescapable.
Being right is not the same as making money
Why a correct view and a losing position coexist more often than beginners expect.
The market does not know you are in it
On personalising price movement, and what that costs in practice.
Profiles in preparation
Each of these needs primary sources checked before it is published. Listed here so you can see what is coming, not as pages that exist.
Jesse Livermore — what the record shows
Including the bankruptcies and the ending, which the popular retelling tends to omit.
In preparation
Paul Tudor Jones on defence
The risk framing, sourced to interviews rather than to paraphrase.
In preparation
Trading quotes that are actually documented
A short list, because most of the famous ones are not traceable to their supposed author.
In preparation