Short selling is not restricted to hedge funds or their cousins on the proprietary trading desks of investment banks, writes James Mackintosh. The most famous short-seller of all time made and lost his fortune two decades before the hedge fund was even invented.

Jesse Livermore, a farmer's boy from Massachusetts who ran away to the city aged 14, shorted the 1929 Wall Street crash for an instant $100m profit. He subsequently lost everything and later committed suicide.