What books shaped your trading mind?

Quote from brownegg:

Psychology has nothing to do with trading, per se. Brett Steenbarger has written a lot of interesting stuff, and manages to keep the topics and advice concrete and topical. Plus he has cred: he had the balls to leave academia and trade.

Kiev, Douglas, etc. are garbage. You either have an edge or you don't. If you do, trade it.

Sorry, I meant to contribute a few books as well. These aren't necessarily the best books there are, but they are books that resonated for me at a particular time and state of knowledge, and therefore "shaped my trading mind," in some sense. In rough order of consumption:

Sklansky, Getting the Best of It*
Schlesinger, Blackjack Attack*
Taleb, Dynamic Hedging
Connors/Raschke, Street Smarts
Crabel, Day Trading With Short Term...
Stridsman, Trading Systems That Work
Kaufman, Trading Systems and Methods
Harris, Trading and Exchanges
Mandelbrot/Hudson, Misbehavior of Markets
Brown, Poker Face of Wall Street

* I was a professional card counter in days past. Nothing makes statistics intuitive like playing a couple hundred thousand hands of 21.
 
Quote from TraderTactics:

The Art of War is a great book to read. It was written by Sun Tzu. The Art Of War is one of the oldest books ever written, yet it is still used today. It is the worlds first known treatise on war but the lessons it teaches can be applied to almost any area of life where conflict is involved. :)

Agreed! It was even qouted in the famous movie "Wall Street." I read it when it was a Marine Officer. Ageless classic!

As far as current reads:
Market Wizards
The New Market Wizards
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
 
Shame on the few people poopoo'ing everybody who reads books. There's some truly great material out there, and NOBODY is smart enough to come up with all the good ideas in all the literature ever written. Turning your nose up at books is blue-collar, big fish in a small pond jerk off.

A few books that don't get enough mention:

"Capital Ideas" by Peter L. Bernstein
"Pit Bull" by Marty Schwartz
 
Quote from PolymathMind:

I am shocked that people would dare to trash the work of Schopenhauer, he is one of the godfathers of modern day philosophy..

"Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and short-sighted — in a word, are big children all their lives, something intermediate between the child and the man, who is a man in the strict sense of the word."

"It is only the man whose intellect is clouded by his sexual instinct that could give that stunted, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race the name of the fair sex ; for the entire beauty of the sex is based on this instinct. One would be more justified in calling them the unaesthetic sex than the beautiful. Neither for music, nor for poetry, nor for fine art have they any real or true sense and susceptibility, and it is mere mockery on their part, in their desire to please, if they affect any such thing."

"For the unnatural position of privilege which the institution of monogamy, and the laws of marriage which accompany it, assign to the woman, whereby she is regarded throughout as a full equivalent of the man, which she is not by any means, cause intelligent and prudent men to reflect a great deal before they make so great a sacrifice and consent to so unfair an arrangement. Therefore, whilst among polygamous nations every woman finds maintenance, where monogamy exists the number of married women is limited, and a countless number of women who are without support remain over; those in the upper classes vegetate as useless old maids, those in the lower are reduced to very hard work of a distasteful nature, or become prostitutes, and lead a life which is as joyless as it is void of honour."

"In almost every nation, both of the new and old world, and even among the Hottentots, property is inherited by the male descendants alone; it is only in Europe that one has departed from this. That the property which men have with difficulty acquired by long-continued struggling and hard work should afterwards come into the hands of women, who, in their want of reason, either squander it within a short time or otherwise waste it, is an injustice as great as it is common, and it should be prevented by limiting the right of women to inherit."

"That woman is by nature intended to obey is shown by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of absolute independence at once attaches herself to some kind of man, by whom she is controlled and governed; this is because she requires a master. If she, is young, the man is a lover; if she is old, a priest."

Etc.


Oh, yeah, how do they dare trash this true Godfather - I bet he didn't get laid much, though (and he probably had some weird thing with his mum).
 
Quote from schizo:

"He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know..."

Not exactly trading books but everyone should read Tao Te Ching and I Ching on their spare time. It has greatly help me as a trader.
Perhaps in future editions they will combine the two and call it Ching-Ching. And then, how could it NOT be about money?
 
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