Not sure if you are new to trading, or have been trading for a while but now want to get into day trading. If you are new to trading, and you are thinking about starting with day trading, my advice is: Don't do it. Day trading is probably the hardest form/style of trading. It takes a lot of experience and discipline to master it. Very hard for beginners. Below is an excerpt from another post I made under the Educational Resources subforum.
No offense to the above posters, but there are too many useless books on the shelves. I wouldn't waste my time reading just any books you can find. Trust me, most of them will do more harm than good. The only book I can recommend is Marcel Link's "High Probability Trading". EliteTrader Review: http://www.elitetrader.com/bo/index.cfm?action=view&B_ID=92&CatID=6 Google Books: http://books.google.com/books?id=Ta...High+Probability+Trading".&ie=ISO-8859-1&cd=1 PS. Never ever listen to the following two bozos: crgarcia and TraderZones.
In the long run, there are only failures in trading (at least for frequent trading). Those who profit in the short run do only by luck. These books are true eye-openers for those suckered into trading by commission greedy brokers.
totally agree - hence i personally suggested books by highly respected authors with no system to sell.
Agree. This was my first, and still is my fav book on trading. Even though the original is old, many of the material is still relevant today. There have been updated versions. I would have to agree that much of the stuff out there is 99% sh-t, like Ironfist said. These books are filled with nothing but general statements that don't help anyone, and they love to show charts filled with indicators of where you should have bought or sold, but when sitting in front of a live screen, I bet these douche's wouldn't know what to do. OH!, you're ma crossover system didn't work?....darn..looked soooo easy in the book!! :eek: A 3rd grader could write a book on technical analysis. Seriously. Books are handy in the sense that they tell you what to be cautious about, and the author might share valuable lessons they learned, but it only goes so far. With most of the information, the trader will either: A - not understand fully B - Think it doesn't apply to him/her C - Forget the information D - All the above then spend the next 3 to 5 yrs learning it the hard way.
You have a very intersting and conventional orientation. Think about all the books you used to learn to drive a car or ride a bike. It may be possible that you read books to learn how to make money. If you change your viewpoint, you may stop reading books for a while. Learning the markets takes a few weeks. the consequence is that you know you know what and why the market is doing what it does at all times. Hypothesize that you do not now know all the time what is going on in the markets. Test yourself on this matter. the test is the presence of fear, anxiety or anger when you look at the market or have a trade on. Check scientifically, with an EMwave PC monitor. Incoherent scores are common among those who think and trade as you say you do. Fear, anxiety and anger comes from looking at something and having no perception. Perception is the sum of sensing and your long term memory's inference on what is being seen. where does the long term memory inference come from? from your mind obviously. filling a person's mind with the proper inference and having it available is the 3 to 5 year problem you are biginning to experience and post about not having as yet. that is not going to change for you. If you examine how long it takes to gain inference as opposed to how long it takes to lose trading capital, the latter takes less time than the former. What is losing one's captial calledfrom a learning perspective? It is called learning repeated failure. most people learn repeated failure and are called upon to quit because they have no capital to trade. You are probably noticing this phenomena frequently, if you read ET. Building the mind's long term memory inference is the learning trader's opportunity. It is done with purposeful drills over a few weeks. Drill number one is posting a fully annotated P, V chart every day. It takes a minumum of inference to annotate what is going on in the market. Three levels of fractals is the minumum annotation requirement. If you know what is going on at any time, you can then analyze it. If you can analyze it you can decide what to be doing each moment. If you can decide moment by moment what to do, then you can take behavioral action to make money all day long. So skip getting your mind differentiated to have full inference for every moment. Wait 3 to 5 years and join those who quit. Or do like traderzones, quit early.
Hi Jack, Interesting comments, I agree that deliberate practice is the way to mastery. A few questions, if you don't mind: 1) "Purposeful drills over a few weeks" - would love to hear you define this further. What drills? 2) "Posting a fully annotated P, V chart every day". I know what P & V stand for, but what exactly do you mean by this? Physically drawing out an equity/index movement? Thanks in advance.
make sure to make room for Van tharp's books just google em and Definitely Trading in zone by mark douglas
what about these? http://www.amazon.com/Toni-Turner/e...ch_lnk_7?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1265992731&sr=1-7 very basic
My post was over the limit and I had to put it in the older word version to post. The rferences are available electronically except for the fourteen books.