If you’re looking for additional reading to supplement your forex trading education, you’ve come to the right place! Below we list just a handful of must-read forex trading books that we think are worth their weight in gold. We’ve read them and we think you should too. Check them out now!
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Come Into My Trading Room: A Complete Guide to Trading
by Alexandar Elder
Dr. Alexander Elder returns to expand far beyond the three M’s (Mind, Method, and Money) of his bestselling Trading for a Living. Shifting focus from technical analysis to the overall management of a trader’s money, time, and strategy, Dr. Elder takes readers from the fundamentals to the secrets of being a successful trader–identifying new, little-known indicators that can lead to huge profits.
Come Into My Trading Room educates the novice and fortifies the professional through expert advice and proven trading methodologies. This comprehensive trading guide provides a complete introduction to the essentials of successful trading; a fresh look at the three M’s, including a proven, step-by-step money management strategy; and an in-depth look at organizing your trading time. The book reviews the basics of trading as well as crucial psychological tactics for discipline and organization–with the goal of turning anyone into a complete and successful trader.
Trading for a Living: Psychology, Trading Tactics, Money Management
by Alexandar Elder
Trading for a Living is based on three M’s: Mind, Method, and Money. Trading for a Living helps you master all of those three areas:
How to become a cool, calm, and collected trader
How to profit from reading the behavior of the market crowd
How to use a computer to find good trades
How to develop a powerful trading system
How to find the trades with the best odds of success
How to find entry and exit points, set stops, and take profits
Trading for a Living helps you discipline your Mind, shows you the Methods for trading the markets, and shows you how to manage Money in your trading accounts so that no string of losses can kick you out of the game.
The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes
by Mark Douglas
The number one reason that I like The Disciplined Trader is that Mark Douglas has no formal training in psychology. Rather, Douglas “was trained in the only classroom that matters-the battlefield of actual trading. Even though this book was published in 1990 and there have been a plethora of trading-psychology books published since then, Douglas’ material stands out as an innovative classic. He just uses his own gift for seeing the mental shortcomings of the losing trader and spells out his own fresh insights on what we, as traders, need to do to experience real success in trading.
Douglas starts the book out from a perspective that many traders can identify with-crushing defeat. Humbling himself to the higher power that the market is and analyzing the formula for defeat, Douglas shows how he was able to reverse-engineer it to find the formula for success that many of the book’s readers over the years have found useful in exorcising their own psychological demons.
Central to Douglas’ thesis is that the elements of character that produce success in most of life’s endeavors are completely different from those that will make you successful as a trader. To thrive in business or some professional career, you have to work hard to develop the skills that will allow you to be in control of your environment. To build a business empire, you have to be a great leader of people. To become a heart surgeon, you have to learn how to control your scalpel. To be a good mother, you have to know how to discipline your children.
A review by Tradingmarkets.com
Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude
by Mark Douglas
Maximizing the trader’s state of mind is the key to successful results. Conflicts, contradictions, and paradoxes in thinking can spell disaster for even a highly motivated, astute, and well-grounded trader. Mark Douglas, a trader, personal trading coach, and industry consultant since 1982 sends the message that “thinking strategy” will profoundly influence a trader’s success rate. Douglas addresses five very specific issues to give traders the insight and understanding about themselves that will make them consistent winners in the market.
Trading In The Zone offers specific solutions to the “people factor” of commodity price movement. It uncovers the true culprit for lack of consistency when it comes to stock picking: lack of focus and self-confidence. Through simple exercises, traders will learn how to think in terms of probabilities and adopt the specific beliefs necessary to developing a winner’s mindset. Along the way, they’ll gain valuable insights into their own entrenched misconceptions about the market.
Backed by compelling examples, Trading In The Zone adds a new dimension to getting an edge on the market. Through a better understanding of themselves, as well as of Wall Street’s realities, traders will come to leverage the power of their psyche for unprecedented profitability.
Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques
by Steve Nison
Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques, the 2nd Edition, provides an in-depth explanation of candlestick plotting and analysis, conveying to the reader, in easy-to-understand language, the author’s years of practical experience in this increasingly popular and dynamic approach to market analysis. It includes hundreds of examples that span the equity, futures, fixed-income, and foreign exchange markets and shows how candlestick charting techniques can be used in almost any market.
It includes everything from the basics, such as constructing the candlesticks and learning the patterns, to advanced topics, such as the rules of multiple technical techniques.
Whether you are new to candlestick charts or a seasoned pro-the reward will be immediate and long-lasting.
Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom
by Van K. Tharp
This is an excellent book that provides the reader with a realistic view of the market and how to trade it. He points out the important things that help make you successful. But more importantly, he points out the traps that most people fall into and explains why this happens.
This book focuses on 4 things: (1) Be Open-Minded (2) Focus on Exit Strategies (3) Positive Expectancy (4) Create your own system by studying other people’s systems.
Be OPEN-MINDED: The book attempts to point out why most investors are too narrow-minded and get too attached to a single trading system. It argues for the importance of first knowing yourself, your habits, etc before creating your own system.
Exit Strategies: The book attempts to explain why Exit Strategies are often more important than Entry Strategies, how other systems often focus too much on entering the market and not enough on exiting the market and why this going against the grain is important.
Positive Expectancy: It teaches you how to create a system of keeping track of your trades so that (1) you’ll know your batting average and (2) don’t get discouraged like everybody else when a trade doesn’t go your way.
Create your own System: It shows you a bunch of other people’s systems in the hopes that you can pick and choose the right trading tools for yourself.
This book is definitely not a get-rich-quick book and it’s more about developing a proper trading mentality which the author sees as a key ingredient for most successful traders. It does not spoon-feed but it does force you to think and do your homework.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
by Edwin Lefevre
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is the thinly disguised biography of Jesse Livermore, a remarkable character who first started speculating in New England bucket shops at the turn of the century. Livermore, who was banned from these shady operations because of his winning ways, soon moved to Wall Street where he made and lost his fortune several times over. What makes this book so valuable are the observations that Lefèvre records about investing, speculating, and the nature of the market itself. For example:
“It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I’ve known many men who were right at exactly the right time and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine–that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.”
Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
A bestselling classic that delves into the minds of some of the world’s most successful traders.
This book examines a side of trading rarely addressed: the human side. In it some of the world’s greatest traders and investors respond candidly to questions regarding their experiences growing up, how they became involved in trading, how they honed their skills and developed as traders, their trading experiences, philosophies and styles, and even some of the considerations that go into their daily selection of trades. A wide variety of personalities and trading methods are represented; whether you scalp the e-minis on Globex or leisurely trade stocks on the NYSE, you will find something of value. This book should be especially valuable to anyone who aspires to trading success but lacks a trading mentor.
The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America’s Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
Some traders distinguish themselves from the herd. How do these spectacular winners whose success occurs across a spectrum of financial markets do it? What separates them from the others? What can they teach the average trader or investor? In The New Market Wizards, these wildly successful traders–some largely unknown–relate the financial strategies that have rocketed them to success. Asking questions that readers with an interest or involvement in the financial markets would love to pose to the financial superstars, Jack D. Schwager gets these financial wizards to share their insights.
The New Market Wizards brings us another bunch of entertaining interviews that shine a light from different perspectives on how to beat the markets. There are so many different methods of trading found in this book, that you are bound to find something that fits your own personal style.
Just like the first book, you will have a lot of fun reading these interviews. This book is full of tips and ideas that will help you increase your knowledge of the markets.
A Complete Guide to Technical Trading Tactics: How to Profit Using Pivot Points, Candlesticks & Other Indicators
by John L. Person
A thorough trading guide from a professional trader The Complete Guide to Technical Trading Tactics can help the new individual investor understand the mechanics of the markets. Filled with in-depth insights and practical advice, this book details what it takes to trade and shows readers how they can broaden their horizons by investing in the futures and options markets. The Complete Guide to Technical Trading Tactics outlines a variety of proven methodologies-pivot points, candlesticks, and other top indicators-so readers may use those that work best for them as well as make their own trading decisions without a second thought. Author John Person also shares his insights on a variety of trading technologies that will allow readers to gain a competitive edge in the market.