Maverick stock trader Jesse Livermore, whose life was a curious blend of the sublime and the ridiculous, had famously remarked that the Wall Street offered nothing that was spectacularly new. “There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before, and will happen again,” the legendary trader had said in reference to equities, which made him both a prince and pauper through the years of the Great Depression.
