Day Trading Book Recommendations | Great Point Capital

It may seem difficult to find books on market trading that seem ethical and trustworthy.   It can be tricky finding a reliable source with values aligned with your own.  There is a wealth of information available with many great books on day trading for new and experienced day traders alike.   It’s important to keep up with changes and technological advances as things always happen fast on Wall Street, and technology is changing even faster.  

In spite of the rapid changes, some basic age-old philosophies still hold value and we would like to share with you some of the best educational and interesting material for  traders from timeless classics to modern documentaries set in today’s fragmented market setting.  The following day trading books are sure to enlighten an up and coming trader the experienced quantitative trader.  

• The Disciplined Trader, Developing Winning Attitudes

Mark Douglas wrote and published The Disciplined Trader in 1990, and it has been a valuable tool for traders at any stage in their career ever since.   In this in-depth analysis of successful winning attitudes, Douglas evaluates the psychological practices of many successful traders.  Douglas offers a chronological system for traders to understand and control their thought process, and reveals how you may inadvertently be limiting your earnings.

Douglas reveals three stages to becoming a successful day trader, and helps you understand how your very thoughts control your perception of the markets.  Douglas helps us to reign in our emotions whether we’re experiencing some losses or having a profitable day.  

In this modern and ever-changing market environment, staying focused on the market can be challenging enough, focusing on and controlling your psychological composure can be even more challenging.  

While computerized algorithms are conducting quantitative trades, let’s not forget that the human factor drives those choices, even the automatic ones.  Keeping control of your emotions can be the difference between profits or losses.

We give The Disciplined Trader two thumbs up and recommend that you give it a read.  

• Trading Systems and Methods (5th Ed.)

Written by Perry Kaufman nearly 30 years ago, this day trading book provides techniques and tools to help day traders meet their goals.  Trading Systems and Methods is available in the Fifth Edition with updates for the market environment today, and compares systematic methods in almost all areas including risk management, momentum, arbitrage and trends.  

Kaufman gives details on each technique disclosed, and helps you to understand how to use them to your best advantage.  Trading Systems and Methods provides more explanation on statistical and mathematical concepts of trading systems.  

In this updated Fifth Edition, Kaufman gives more information on systems in the current market environment and the risk associated with those systems than in prior versions. This new version also includes access to a website packed full of extra materials, and spreadsheet for an interactive experience.  

Trading Systems and Methods provides valuable reference material to current trading systems, revealing methods and techniques to use them advantageously as a successful day trader.  We highly recommend adding this to your reading list.

Contact Great Point Capital, LLC today, in either our Chicago Office, or our Austin Office, to learn more about how we can successfully trade together with high performance results. Great Point Capital, LLC offers buying power, access to Takion software platform with excellent IT support, and the benefits of working with an experienced team.  

Day Trading Book Reviews | Great Point Capital

If you’re looking for some good books to add to your knowledge of Day Trading or Trading Stocks, we have a couple that we give two thumbs up in review:  Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefévre, and Market Wizards, Updated – Interviews with Top Traders by Jack Schwager.  

Basic age-old philosophies still have merit and we would love to share with you some of the best educational material for day traders from timeless classics to compelling documentaries set in today’s fragmented market structure.  The following two day trading books are sure to enrich and enlighten a trader new to the business and even the experienced quantitative trader.  

• Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

This classic trading book was written by American author Edwin Lefévre, and published in 1923.  Claiming to be fictional, it clearly depicts the investing trials and tribulations in the life of Jesse Lauriston Livermore, a well-known securities analyst and day trader who began his trading career at the young age of 14.   

Jesse Livermore was born in 1877 into a farming family of Massachusetts.  He left the life planned for him on the family farm to put his superb mathematical and analytical skills to use trading stocks.  He is famous for making several multi-million dollar fortunes during the 1920’s, (over one billion dollars by today’s currencies), and then losing them several times over.  Throughout his illustrious career, he amassed a wealth of knowledge that has been shared for decades through the writing of Edwin Lefévre, including the following quotation, one of many, that is shared in this book:

“It was the change in my own attitude that was of supreme importance to me. It taught me little by little, the essential difference between betting on fluctuations and anticipating inevitable advances and declines, between gambling and speculating.”

It may appear that some of these factors have been removed from the decision making process with the onslaught of computerized algorithms driving the stock market today.   Edwin Lefèvre reminds us that in spite of the changes with technology, these human factors still drive the tools we use for trading today.  

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator has offered wisdom to investors and traders for generations, even Alan Greenspan is quoted as saying that it is “a font of investing wisdom”.  An updated version was published in 2009 with insights into the life of Jesse Lauriston Livermore.   

We highly recommend this book, it is sure to please while adding to your understanding of stock trading.

• Market Wizards, Updated.  Interviews with Top Traders

In Jack Schwager’s original book, Market Wizards, published in 1989, he dives into the attitudes of some of the most successful traders on Wall Street.  In this new version, Market Wizards, Updated – Interviews with Top Traders, Schwager highlights new interviews with some of the most successful traders in the markets.

Schwager showcases interviews with some well known money-makers like Paul Tudor Jones, founder of Tudor Investment Corporation, philanthropist and hedge fund manager.  He also features and interview with Ed Seykota, a commodities trader with degrees in both Management and Electrical Engineering from MIT.  Ed was an original pioneer of computerized systems trading.

Bruce Kovner declined an interview to Fortune Magazine when they wanted to run a story called “The 11 Billion Dollar Man”, as he rarely gives interviews.  Bruce graduated from Harvard College in 1966, then started trading commodities.  He founded Caxton Associates in 1983, a well-known hedge fund.   

Jack Schwager reveals these industry leaders’ trading philosophies, thought processes and skills deemed necessary to be a successful trader on Wall Street. Schwager summarizes what he believes to be the biggest lessons learned from his interviews.

Shwager offers a variety with different market outlooks, and each success story differing from the last.  One thing stands out as a constant, however, that solid methodology combined with the right mental attitude are fundamental characteristics for trading success.  

Give Market Wizards a read, we’re sure you will find it as enjoyable as we do.  

Contact Great Point Capital, LLC today, in either our Chicago Office, or our Austin Office, to learn more about how we can successfully trade together with high performance results. Great Point Capital, LLC offers buying power, access to Takion software platform with excellent IT support, and the benefits of working with an experienced team.  

Flash Boys Review | Great Point Capital

Flash Boys, a Wall Street Revolt

Michael Lewis is the author of Flash Boys, a Wall Street Revolt, written about a group of men that banded together to investigate the insidious happenings on Wall Street.  Flash Boys was published in 2014, and is a non-fiction account of the rise in high frequency trading due to predatory new computer algorithms put in place by brokers and big Wall Street banks.  Flash Boys reveals how, as the band of revolutionary new Wall Street friends claim, the market is rigged.  

Brad Katsuyama, and several of his colleagues walked away from million dollar employment offers to get to bottom of what was happening on Wall Street to inform the public, investors, and other traders of how predatory HFT firms were manipulating the market.  

The book starts out focusing on the new found love for speed in the marketplace.  Not just timely, we’re talking microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second)!  Installing the newest and fastest high speed fiber optic cables, gave an advantage to only big Wall street banks and brokers, an advantage worth billions of dollars.  Lewis reveals, in fact, how many of them were willing to pay millions of dollars simply to gain a few microseconds of an advantage.  

This book explains how electronic algorithms have replaced the human trader on the floor, and how this sweeping technological change has impacted the markets.  

Brad Katsuyama, and his colleagues went on to found IEX, the Investors Exchange, the newest Stock Exchange recently approved by the SEC,  offering a solution to fix some of the broken areas they revealed in their quest.   Brad set out on a mission to pursue the truth about what was happening in the markets since the onset of electronic trading.  He never lost sight of his goal of informing investors of the truth, and maintaining his ethical values.  

Flash Boys is a very enlightening book for not only day traders, but for anyone with a retirement or investment account of any size.  Michael Lewis grabs your attention with the first chapter and keeps you engaged and wanting to know what’s coming next until the very end.  This one is definitely a worthwhile read.  

Read more about IEX, The Investor’s Exchange, in our recent blog.  

Contact Great Point Capital, LLC today, in either our Chicago Office, or our Austin Office, to learn more about how we can successfully trade together with high performance results. Great Point Capital, LLC offers buying power, access to Takion software platform with excellent IT support, and the benefits of working with an experienced team.