That he did! But if only he stopped at his peak in 1929:
At the peak of his career in 1929
Jesse Livermore was worth at least $100 million.
People sometimes ask how much that’s worth in today’s money.
As a rule of thumb, a dollar in 1929 was worth 10 to 100 times what it’s worth today – and Jesse’s fortune would have amounted to between 1.1 and 14.0 billion dollars in today’s money – a remarkable feat for a self-made stock and commodities trader who traded with his own money, not other people’s.
To assess Jesse’s fortune more scientifically, the
measuringworth calculator gave the following results for today’s value of $100 million in 1929:
- $1.27 billion using the Consumer Price Index
- $1.02 billion using the GDP deflator
- $2.27 billion using the value of consumer bundle
- $3.89 billion using the unskilled wage
- $5.51 billion using the nominal GDP per capita
- $14 billion using the relative share of GDP