Edwards, Magee: technical analysis of stock trends Schwager: market wizards (1) Soros: the alchemy of finance PretzelPiece: ... (not finished yet)
Since you are including gambling books... Any poker or mathematics book by David Sklansky. If you wanna be a successful trader... You have to think like Mr.Sklansky.
How I Made $2M in the Stock Market by Nicolas Darvas, definitely. Ironically, you can not emulate Darvas today because newspapers don't print complete stock tables anymore. Even the WSJ only has 1500 stocks in it's daily tables and they have very little info compared to days of old. IBD doesn't include stocks under $10 and nobody includes the daily high and low. Back in the mid 90's when I first started getting into technical analysis I would go to the library and go through the old WSJ's on microfiche and write down the volume, high, low and close for ten stocks that I had chosen to draw charts for. After I had the historical charts drawn I would update them each day from newspaper stock tables and I would keep the stock tables in a stack in my closet incase I thought I might need them for making more charts to save myself another trip to the library. Reading the stock tables helps give a different perspective on the market than just scanning for certain setups with a computer. I still read the WSJ stock tables from time to time, but I sure wish they had complete tables like the days of old.
Hearts Under Caution by Gina Wilkins http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Under-...776053?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176142539&sr=8-13
In no specific order : - "New Trading systems and methods" Kaufman - "Les systèmes de trading" Orphelin( in french, sorry... ) - "The new market wizards" Schwager - "Options, futures and derivatives" Hull ( don't know the real name in english ) - "reminiscences of a stock operator" Lefebvre In fact, I think you can get as valuable infos on message boards, but books are a good way to structurate your ideas.