What Are Some of The Best Books On Trading?

Would you like to know what the experts at Simpler Trading keep on their nightstands? Staying sharp means keeping your brain active and staying on top of the trading methods that work. This article will briefly discuss some of the best trading books on our trading desks!

Why not consider adding these good reads to your personal library to increase your wealth of knowledge? There are so many best-selling books on trading it can be cumbersome to know where to begin – which is why our curated list is designed to make it simple for you.

We would love to hear your feedback on what your favorite book is, tag us on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter!

Learn to Master the Day Trade 

This compilation is made of some of the best-selling books on day trading. Trading in the Zone, Mastering the Trade, Reminisces of a Stock Operator, are at the top of our lists. These literary masterpieces will help expand your grasp of day trading by helping you understand the mindset of some of the best traders in the world.

Mastering the Trade, Third Edition by John F. Carter

We feel this is an overall balanced go-to guide for launching a career in trading, and it has been fully updated for today’s turbulent markets. Successful trader and founder of Simpler Trading, John F. Carter has made his popular guide more relevant and effective than ever in his latest edition. This new edition of Mastering the Trade, Third Edition includes the essential content that has made it a bestselling classic and includes new information to help traders make the best trading decision in every situation.

Mastering the Trade combines insightful market overview with strategies and concepts, where Carter provides: proven set-ups, with optimal markets and non-negotiable trading rules, exact entry, exit, and stop-loss levels for swing and intraday trading, and seven key internals, from Skew to VIX, a pre-market checklist for analyzing recent market behavior, scanning techniques for pinpointing high-probability setups, effective risk control techniques, and techniques for predicting market corrections.

Tips that run the gamut from valuable hardware and software to market mechanics, pivot points, and position sizing are all covered as Carter delivers a suite of tools to teach traders how to beat the competition on a regular basis. Mastering the Trade, Third Edition builds your expertise in knowing what’s working for you and what’s working against you.

Best Book for Day Trading for Beginners

Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits by Richard Schabacker 

Richard W. Schabacker’s great work, Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits is a worthy addition to any library. His “pioneering research” represents one of the finest works ever produced on technical analysis, and this book remains an example of the highest order of analytical quality and incisive trading wisdom.

Originally devised as a practical course for investors, it paved the way for Robert Edwards and John Magee’s best-selling Technical Analysis of Stock Trends – a debt which is acknowledged in their foreword: ‘Part One is based in large part on the pioneer researches and writings of the late Richard Schabacker.’

Schabacker presents technical analysis as a totally organized subject and comprehensively lays out the various important patterns, formations, trends, support, and resistance areas, and associated supporting technical detail.

He presents factors that can be confidently relied on and gives equal attention to the blemishes and weaknesses that can upset the best analytical forecasts. These are factors that investors would do well to absorb and apply when undertaking the fascinating game of price, time, and volume analysis.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator – Collection by Edwin LeFevre and Jon D Markman

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is widely regarded as a classic investment book. This book is based on investment principles and offers a peek into the life of a legendary stock speculator. The writing style, interactions with other speculators and individuals, as well as other remarkable aspects of this trading journey draw you into his time in the early 1900s and offer plenty of laughs, as well as give you opportunities to learn.

The book collection tells of three trading eras:

• 1890-1910: Livermore was able to make easy money by taking advantage of the bid-ask spread on inactive stocks with a leverage of 100-to-1 at bucket shops.
• 1910-1920: Livermore was a stock trader on the New York Stock Exchange, where he went both boom and bust several times by using high leverage.
• the 1920s: Livermore engaged in market manipulation which was not illegal or without precedent then, charging fees of 25% of the market value of the manipulated stock. This was before the creation of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

Many investors have credited Reminiscences of a Stock Operator as a major source of material on stock trading.

The Playbook: An Inside Look at How to Think Like a Professional Trader by Mike Bellafiore

If you are looking for the best day trading books for beginners, we think this book provides the essentials to become a truly great trader – whether for yourself or for a proprietary trading firm.

This unique approach lets you learn by watching new traders walk through actual trades, and explains what they’ve tried to do, and as they survive brutally tough expert critiques. The Playbook reveals how professional traders must think in order to succeed “under fire,” how they assess their own performance, and how they work relentlessly to improve.

Using concrete, actionable setups drawn from extensive trading and training experience, Bellafiore walks through an extraordinary array of trades, showing readers how to maximize profits and avoid disastrous hidden pitfalls. He covers support plays, bull-and-bear flags, opening drives, important intraday levels, bounce and fade trades, pullbacks, scalps, technical opportunities, consolidation, relative strength, market trades, and more.

Bellafiore also presents indispensable insights on psychology and trader development, based on his work with hundreds of traders on a major commodity exchange and an elite prop firm’s trading desk. Packed with color, personality, and realism, this is an exciting guide to real-world trading.

Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude

by Mark Douglas 

We feel this is one of the best day trading psychology books. In Trading in the Zone, Douglas uncovers the underlying reasons for a lack of consistency and helps traders overcome the ingrained mental habits that are costing them money.  He takes on the myths of the market and exposes them one by one teaching traders to look beyond random outcomes, to understand the true realities of risk, and to be comfortable with the “probabilities” of market movement that govern all market speculation.

The main contents of Trading in the Zone are dedicated to one goal – to become a consistently successful trader. According to Douglas, the majority of aspiring traders does it wrong when they study the behavior of the market rather than considering what is inside their own mind and understanding their traits. There are five “fundamental truths” about the market at the core of the “right” trading mindset:

1. Anything can happen.
2. You do not need to know what will happen to earn money.
3. The distribution of winning and losing trades is random.
4. An edge means only a higher probability of a winning trade compared to a losing one.
5. Every instance of the market is unique.

That anything can happen means that the market is composed of traders and there is no way any of the traders can know with certainty what the other one is going to do. Some technical, fundamental, or sentiment indicators strongly forecast some movement, but the real outcome could be completely different as it may take only one trader to affect the prices.

This book also tops the list of best day trading books available on audible.

Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques by Steve Nison

We think this is both the best book for understanding day trading and the best book for day trading cryptocurrency. Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques, Second Edition, by Steve Nison, is the ultimate guide to a critical tool for mastering the financial markets. We also like this book for its simplicity and ease of understanding the movements of speculative investing. 

A longstanding form of technical analysis, Japanese candlestick charts are a dynamic and increasingly popular technical tool for traders. Known for its versatility, ancient charting can be fused with every other technical tool available – including traditional Western technical analysis.

Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques is a comprehensive and trusted guide to this essential technique. Influenced by years of research from a pioneer trader, this book covers much-needed explanations, including examples, to show how candlestick techniques can be used in all of today’s markets.

This totally updated revision focuses on traders and investors looking for:

• All new charts including more intra-day markets 
• New candlestick charting techniques 
• More focus on active trading for swing, online, and day traders 
• New Western techniques in combination with candles 
• A focus on capital preservation. 

Traders who participate in investment styles from speculation and hedging to futures and equities will find candlestick charting is the next level up for both amateur day traders and seasoned technicians.

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis

When looking for inspiration in the world of trading, look no further than Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael Lewis. This bestseller was also in the film industry and reminded us all that strategy is king.

Moneyball is about a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Michael Lewis follows the journey of the low-budget Oakland A’s visionary general manager Billy Beane and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball theorists. They are all in search of new baseball knowledge. However, these insights will cause the little guy who is willing to discard old wisdom and the edge over big money to take a pause.

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