16 year old new to trading

[Arnie]

It's a new age. Stock analysts, chart technicians, fund managers, risk analysts, and traders are being replaced by quantitative models, developed by statisticians, physicists, mathematicians. These models are implemented by software architects and software engineers.

The most successful hedge fund in the industry, Renaissance Technologies, employs no traders.

At the end of the day it's still human emotion that drives the markets. All that other stuff is just a way to filter it.

 

[murray t turtle]

The OP, whom we're advising here (or at least "whom I was advising" in responding as I did to his request for book recommendations) is 16 years old and at high school and new to trading. (Did you notice the thread title?).

I was 14, myself, when I started reading trading books. I've read probably 80 or 90 now, of which a small handful were very good and very helpful to me (as I know they've been to others, too), so those were the few I recommended.

You're completely entitled to your opinion, of course, but it doesn't match my own experience, and I've now been making a full-time living from trading for long enough not to feel like apologising for recommending the books that helped me so much, and to feel quite entitled to defend why I'm doing so, too. I do agree fully with your observation that there are many awful trading books around (and probably "most of them"), but those aren't the ones I recommended.

%%
I wish i had read trading/investing books @14,+Ela, about that time i was gambling in pool halls for $00.25+......LOL [My banker dad a had a championship book on playing pool, not that most bankers play pool in pool hall/gamble-they dont,LOL] The fact that most businesses or traders/system buyers/traders lose money, i cant help that. i still find IBD weekly/charts + newspaper helpful; but about 95 % of the stuff i see in Financial Times or Wall Street Journal i find UN-helpful
I seldom return a trading book; like one discretionary trader noted, with discretion,''i recognized truth in his voice''

 

[Visaria]

I've read the FT, on and off, for over 20 years....it's never made me a penny.

 

[Butterball]

I have been obsessing with checking the prices.

Stop that now. It's counter productive. Work towards a top 1% SAT score. That's what you should focus on right now.

My question is where can I learn how to start trading now?

Read. A lot.

If you want to trade, no matter what style of investing or trading you choose, I recommend to read these books ONCE A YEAR. Each year, as you gain experience, you will gain new insights. What appeared cryptic during year one or two will make sense after year five in the markets.

1. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
2. All the Schwager interview books

On a side-node, stop wishing you work for a big bank in NYC. You have no idea if you will actually enjoy that; maybe you'd hate it, maybe you'd love it. Don't be one of those thousand newcomers who dream of a specific job, train half their life for it, get themselves into 20+ years of debt, only to find out they actually hate their supposed dream job. Get into a good college and get summer internships with banks to try it out. That'll give you a pretty good idea if you're going to enjoy it as a career.

When you're there, look at the senior staff who work there for 5, 7 or 10 years. How do they look? Healthy? Happy? Or stressed out, angry, obese, red-eyed with signs of substance abuse? How do they treat you (the clueless nobody)? Do they enjoy teaching you or do they enjoy making fun of you? Then, and only then, carefully make up your mind if that's who you want to be in 7-12 years time.

 

[Garett Sim]

As you amy know stock being the centralized market has its own standard criteria which you should maintain while investing. Now what I can say that you should acquire professional knowledge about the stock market in any college or you can take the help of online trading course also. Or if you want to learn about stock market practically, you can invest in smaller lot and learn by trading in the market practically.

 

[solonz]

I was also trading at your age ... (on demo, at first) ...

If it helps, this was how I learned ...

(a) By reading well-recommended, well-established, mainstream, orthodox trading textbooks, published by well-recommended, well-established, mainstream, orthodox publishers (i.e. "peer-reviewed" and "quality controlled") and avoiding internet "information";

(b) By getting in thousands of hours of screen-time after understanding all the basics of probability and statistics that any trader has to learn, to become profitable (so that my first 3 years' experience was genuinely 3 years' experience rather than the same one month's experience repeated 36 times over);

(c) By remaining aware, at all times, that in a field of endeavour with a huge turnover of participants very few of whom ever achieve profitability, most of the readily available "information", and especially the apparent consensuses of opinion, are always far more likely to be misguided than helpful;

(d) By having expert tuition available (from a successful family member in the trade);

(e) By NOT trading with real money until I'd proven, repeatedly and exhaustively and exhaustingly, on demo accounts, that I could avoid the five classic mistakes of aspiring traders, which are ...

1. Not having a genuine edge (for which a common reason is reliance on inadequate, defective or mistaken "information": aspiring traders quite commonly seek short-cuts, imagining that if they just copy something that "works", they'll be able to bypass most of the actually-required education and experience phases);
   
   2. Confusing entry-methods with trading systems (for which a common reason is the deeply mistaken - but widely-held - impression that if one enters at a good time, everything else will somehow, magically "work out well" even without specifically considering trade-management subsequent to the entry- it won't);
   
   3. Under-capitalisation (for which a common reason is a misguided belief-set about what's typically achievable and over what time-frame: most people significantly overestimate what they can achieve quickly and easily, while significantly underestimating what they could achieve slowly and with difficulty);
   
   4. Excessive position-sizing (for which a common reason is just a general lack of statistical/probabilistic knowledge - most people aren't mathematically gifted, and it's really, really difficult to make a success of trading without some real understanding of the statistics and probabilities involved);
   
   5. Lack of patience, discipline and "psychological aspects" (on which I'm far too Aspergerish to be able or willing to comment further, myself, as I happen to have more patience and discipline than almost anyone else - and nearly pathologically so!).

Those five may also overlap, to some extent. I can't prove a word of it, needless to say, but I very strongly suspect that combinations of these five reasons, collectively, probably account for about 99% of all "aspiring trader failure".





These are the books that most helped me, and enabled me to trade profitably ...

Profitability & Systematic Trading (Michael Harris)

Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (Van K. Tharp - an outstanding starting-point, especially the second half of the book)

Beyond Technical Analysis (Tushar S. Chande)

Understanding Price Action (Bob Volman)

The Mathematics of Money Management: Risk Analysis Techniques for Traders Ralph Vince (we all need some reliable understanding of what's in this book, although not necessarily from this specific source, before trading with real money)

Naked Forex: High-Probability Techniques for Trading Without Indicators (Alex Nekritin & Walter Peters - worth reading even if you don't intend to trade forex)

Daytrading (Joe Ross) (this is an updated re-issue of an earlier book - "Trading by the Minute", I think it was called)

Trading The Ross Hook (Joe Ross) (I keep coming back to this one again and again, because it's simple and logical and helpful, and the whole concept is based on one of the soundest principles of price action trading, namely "buy the dips in an uptrend and sell the rallies in a downtrend")

A Mathematician Plays The Market (John Allen Paulos)

Fooled By Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb - very worthwhile!)

Why People Believe Weird Things (Michael Shermer) - this book and Taleb's, just above, are hugely helpful - albeit indirectly - for "understanding what's going on in forums"!

Trading Price Action Trends - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)

Trading Price Action Trading Ranges - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)

Trading Price Action Reversals - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)

"Warning": Al Brooks' set of three textbooks is kind of badly written and very badly edited (especially considering who the publisher is), and pretty difficult to plough through, but their content's excellent and was super-helpful to me, so those are a kind of "mixed recommendation": I actually think his online video course is much, much better and more helpful and more approachable, but it's also more expensive ($250, I think - but that's still very good value, in my opinion, for about 37 hours of instructional videos).

Thank You for such a detailed, and generous donation of your time in putting together this informative list. Very much appreciated!

 

[murray t turtle]

An interesting (and perhaps slightly pessimistic) perspective?

If one exercises a little judgment, I think it's probably considerably preferable (ideally in conjunction with other approaches) to the alternative of not asking for recommendations in a trading forum. (And this isn't entirely a retail trading forum.)

%% LOL; but you have to use discernment As far as trading books; a small sample never helped much. LOL

 

[Sprout]

%% LOL; but you have to use discernment As far as trading books; a small sample never helped much. LOL

Murray, why do your posts always start with two percentage symbols?

 

[murray t turtle]

Murray, why do your posts always start with two percentage symbols?

%%%
NOT always, Mr Sprout; its like 95% +/. Someone else, she asked 95% + one?? No its 95% more or less.

 

[Sprout]

%%%
NOT always, Mr Sprout; its like 95% +/. Someone else, she asked 95% + one?? No its 95% more or less.

So it’s not some type of forum aggregator for parsing and just personal style?