Jesse Livermore, the legendary stock operator, ended up taking his own life with a gun. His son, Jesse Livermore Jr., also committed suicide, and even his grandson, Livermore, chose the same fate.
An elite family of traders—three generations, all dead by suicide.
What kind of curse is this?

1. Extreme thresholds and dopamine backlash

Livermore’s core strategy was highly leveraged, concentrated positions combined with trend following. This approach could indeed generate nuclear-level wealth during a raging bull market or a massive crash, but think about how devastating that must have been to the human nervous system.

When your brain becomes accustomed to extreme dopamine stimulation from gains or losses of millions of dollars every second, everything in ordinary life starts to feel dull. Drinking tea, taking a walk—those ordinary pleasures are simply no longer stimulating enough.

Moreover, he went completely bankrupt four times in his life. Each time, he fell from the clouds to the bottom, then fought his way back from scratch. Every round severely drained his vitality. By the time of his final bankruptcy in 1934, he was nearly sixty. Human psychological resilience has its limits. It is like a rubber band stretched countless times: eventually, that final pull makes it snap. He no longer had the spirit or physical strength to make another comeback.

2. The pain of his family of origin

A high-pressure profession like trading requires a safe haven to relieve stress. But Livermore’s family was not a safe haven—it was practically the Bermuda Triangle.

His second wife was a severe alcoholic. During their divorce, she took away a large portion of his core assets, delivering a devastating blow that helped break him. She even shot and wounded their own son while intoxicated. That shadow of despair continued to hang over the family psychologically.

3. When the times abandon you, they do not even give you a warning

After the Great Depression of 1929, the United States established the SEC and introduced extremely strict regulatory laws, completely shutting down unrestricted short selling and market manipulation.

The most devastating measure was the uptick rule. When a stock was falling, you could not blindly keep shorting it on the way down. You had to wait for the price to move up by one tick before you could short it again.

This effectively destroyed Livermore’s signature technique. His greatest strength had been aggressively adding to short positions during waterfall declines, using his enormous selling pressure to create panic and accelerate the sell-off. Once the new rules took effect, his entire approach stopped working. He realized that his sword had suddenly gone dull and that the rules of the era had changed. The collapse of that sense of self-identity was fatal.

Ultimately, trading is the ultimate test of human nature. If you focus only on returns and leverage while neglecting your physical health, family relationships, and private mental space, the market will eventually swallow you whole, with interest.

Never let the market destroy your ability to appreciate ordinary happiness. That is the most complete form of bankruptcy.