Best book for a novice trader to learn daytrading?
- Thread starter Johnson69
- Start date
You might not like the answer but here it is, you will not make it as a day trader, day trader have to often do what is not written, they are people who know how to use "search" like you come to a forum that has so much good education in Education Resources section and yet here you are asking for help in selecting a book. Do you know how to program? Do you have huge sample size in many different moods of the market place? Long way to go.
In the same vein I'd further include Reminiscences of a Stock Operator ( Edwin Lefevre), The Education of a Speculator ( Victor Niederhoffer), More Money Than God ( Sebastian Mallaby), The Alpha Masters ( Maneet Ahuja).
You can make money day trading, but first a word of caution. It's harder today to make money day trading than ever before. Some algo traders are so fast, it's like they are trading off the screen and you are trading from a chart in a newspaper. The price you see on your screen is no longer the price. That being said, there's also the winner's pyramid. On the longer time frames, even mom and pop can make money with no effort at all. At the top of the pyramid are the short term day traders, the few survivors left in a group of highly intelligent, hard working, experienced, talented people. Most of these people fail.
Not that I hate day trading, I happen to have a pretty good day trading system. It's just that money is easier to get, and to keep, on higher time frames, and that's what trading is about, making, and keeping money and nothing else.
Books:
Reminisences of a Stock Operator
One Good Trade
Time Compression Trading - Jason Alan Jankovsky
Diary of a Commodities Trader -Peter Brandt
I like the last two books because they discuss the fact that technical analysis isn't all that predictive. In fact, Brandt, a lifelong classical Edwards and McGee technical trader says prediction is the least of its benefits and a trader could have made a tidy living taking the other side of all his trades. I have heard this same advice echoed countless times by trading masters. Most of them treat their trades as if they have no edge at all and just close bad entries. They can't all articulate why they do what they do, but they all do it.
Good luck. Don't forget, live isn't even remotely like paper trading when we are talking day trading. Find a market like Forex where you can trade a micro account and try your hand at it. That way, when you move up in size and start to lose, you can isolate what's wrong. Nine times out of ten you are trading more money than your emotions will allow, but you will have the data to zero in on that magic amount of risk that leaves your head alone. (trust me)
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Exactly! This is a proper list of must read books.
How I Made $2M in the Stock Market, by Nick Darvos
A quick read that underscores the importance of trading on longer time frames, and the value of set-it, and forget-it.
A quick read that underscores the importance of trading on longer time frames, and the value of set-it, and forget-it.
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lovethetrade
Have to agree with this, the market moves so fast that really you need to be automated or have enough information to be semi automated to make it at day trading these days.
I'm sceptical whether books will help you also. Reckon you'd have better success studying pure price action and volume (with no indicators) rather than allowing books to pollute your thinking.
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Absolutely no disrespect implied at all, and maybe it's only a pedantic point, but it seems to me that the comments above apply only to scalping specifically, not necessarily to daytrading in general.
(I speak as a daytrader who's nowhere near being a scalper, and what you've said above isn't relevant to my own trading, at all.)
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lovethetrade
I assume he's referring to HFT and scalping etc
I also day trade with 1, 5 and 30 min bars and don't have a problem with speed of market.
Agreed. However, I still stand by my initial premise, trading gets progressively easier as the time frame rises. That being said, I must admit my wife does pretty well with a system that includes a 3 tick chart on the ES. Super fast is not me.