Supposedly this is a roman a clef about Jesse Livermore's career. There's a lot of stuff in this book that makes sense of markets in ways that pretty much no other investing book I've ever read does. Some what I remember are bucket shops, tape sense, marketing campaigns for new stocks, risk of ruin (Livermore went bust over and over), and what amounts to compulsive gambling.

Honestly, nothing's changed. It's more modern; but otherwise all the same.