Shortly after the big Liberation Day (2025) tariff shenanigans (announce tariffs, crash the market, pause tariffs, profit), I asked on Bluesky (in a since deleted post) if there is a good manual for how to trade and profit in a corrupt unregulated market, and Jerry Neumann replied with the cover art for Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, with which I was wholly unfamiliar. (My interests in finance and the stock market are fairly recent). And while I didn’t take too much actionable learning from reading about the protagonist’s time building intuition from tickers and trading in bucket shops (and eventually expanding to trading in brokerage offices around the country, including near my birthplace in Palm Beach), I did develop a better picture of the origins of Wall Street and the massive systems that are the present-day financial markets. Sadly, a lot of the methods Livingston (the fictionalized protagonist based on Jesse Livermore) used to profit have since been banned, but perhaps we’re entering a period of reduced enforcement and regulation?