What differentiates the highly successful market practitioners—the Market Wizards—from ordinary traders? What traits do they share? What lessons can the average trader learn from those who achieved superior returns for decades while still maintaining strict risk control? Jack Schwager has spent the past 25 years interviewing the market legends in search of the answers—a quest chronicled in four prior Market Wizards volumes totalling nearly 2,000 pages. In The Little Book of Market Wizards, Jack Schwager seeks to distil what he considers the essential lessons he learned in conducting nearly four dozen interviews with some of the world′s best traders.
Jack Schwager is a recognized industry expert in futures and hedge funds and the author of a number of widely acclaimed financial books. He is currently the co-portfolio manager for the ADM Investor Services Diversified Strategies Fund, a portfolio of futures and FX managed accounts. Previously, Mr. Schwager was a partner in the Fortune Group, a London-based hedge fund advisory firm, which specialized in creating customized hedge fund portfolios for institutional clients.
The book delves into the mind-set and processes of highly successful traders, providing insights that all traders should find helpful in improving their trading skills and results. Each chapter focuses on a specific theme essential to market success and describes how all market participants can benefit by incorporating the related traits, behaviours, and philosophies of the Market Wizards in their own trading.
Filled with compelling anecdotes that bring the trading messages to life, and direct quotes from the market greats that resonate with the wisdom born of experience and skill.
The book covers these main principles of successful trading:
- Resilience to come back from early losses and account blow ups.
- Focusing on what really matters in trading success.
- Trading a method that fits your own personality.
- Trading with an edge.
- The harder you work at trading the luckier you will get.
- The homework to develop a methodology should be hard but the actual trading itself should be simple.
- Mental and emotional control is key while winning or losing.
- Managing the risk to avoid failure and pain.
- Discipline to follow your trading plan.
- Confidence and independence as a trader.
- Being a good loser.
- Be patient with winning trades and impatient with losing trades.
- The right way to position size.
- Comfortable trades are usually losing trades while the more uncomfortable trades are usually the winners.
- Emotions are dangerous masters to the trader.
- You have to evolve as a trader or eventually fail.
- It is not the news but how the market reacts to that news.
- Learning through mistakes.
- Passion for trading is the fuel for eventual success.
These principles are explained through the words of some of the greatest long term traders out there.
Stepping clearly outside the narrow confines of most investment books, The Little Book of Market Wizards focuses on the value of understanding one′s self within the context of successful investing.
For an in-depth view of the art of investing and how to adopt the practices of top professionals, Schwager’s Little Book is one of the best, most entertaining guides out there.
In summary, Jack Schwager has done a great job condensing the best of his four Market Wizard books into this one smaller work and staying true to the series. While the larger books focus on the full interviews of the Market Wizards and share the best that they had to offer readers from those interviews this book distils the best of the best principles, examples, and advice into one quick and easy read.
It’s an excellent book for new traders and an outstanding resource for experienced traders to review each year to keep themselves on the right track. If you have read any of Schwager’s previous works, you understand just how invaluable his interviews have been in shaping the careers, mindsets and wallets of a whole generation of traders. Little Book of Market Wizards is an excellent addition to your library as a reference piece.
| Title | The Little Book of Market Wizards: Lessons from the Greatest Traders |
| Author | Jack D. Schwager |
| first published | January 1st 2014 |
| Publisher | Wiley |
| ISBN | 111885862X |
| Language | English |
