The core idea explored in this investors' field manual disguised as a memoir is that markets evolve whereas human nature doesn’t—so the winning edge is psychological, not predictive.

Through a thinly veiled Jesse Livermore, Lefèvre turns Wall Street into a laboratory of behaviour: bucket-shop beginnings, headline-fuelled manias, and the brutal tuition of losses. The lessons are specific and unsentimental—wait for the right setup, scale into strength, cut quickly, and when you’re right, sit tight. Tips are poison; a plan, position sizing, and emotional control are oxygen. The “tape” is less about prices than about crowds, and the hardest work is resisting the crowd inside your own head.

Told with brisk, novelistic pace - it’s an early, lucid guide to decision-making under uncertainty: essential for investors, founders, and anyone whose job is to keep their nerve when stakes rise.