God in the Pits by Mark Ritchie. It has less to do with trading (although his life involves that and there are some great trading stories in it) and more to do with his journey to find his place in the world. I love autobiographies of successful traders and this is one of my favorites (along with Pit Bull by Marty Swartz which is quite a contrast to Ritchie's book).
Pit Bull by Marty Schwartz was great! Highly recommended for entertainment, but not so much for learning his techniques, Stacy
This is a great PDF I found. Unfortunately (lol), it's related to trading. http://www.tradelabstrategies.com/customers/tradingstrategiesrev2.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/08...f=pd_bbs_2/002-3730675-6366407?_encoding=UTF8 (Since the thread starter specifically asked for a list of non-trading books that might be helpful to someone's trading, and several respondents suggested books actually related to trading, I just thought I'd balance it out a bit.)
among other reasons why game theory works is that it, like trading , is based on a derivative of behavior iow, traders behave based on - a trader buys because he thinks other traders will think other traders think it is a buy - think about that long and hard. it is the essence of the psychology of trading decisions. it is a derivative. traders don't buy because they think a stock is a buy (it's not that simple). on the whole, they buy because they think others will buy (because that will drive the stock up). and they think others will buy because they think those others will perceive that OTHERs will want to buy. this also shows how trading is different from investing. iow, A buys because he thinks B will think that (B,D, E, F, G, H, J, K) will think it a buy because that is what drives stocks up. demand outstripping supply . NOTHING else. i contrast this strongly with investing. in investing you can, among other things, buy stocks that are trading at a discount to their VALUE, and then wait for prices to regress to a mean. this works. it's also (of course) contrarian. with the short time frame of trading, stocks can remain under (or over) pricedfor much longer time frames in relation to their underlying value, and thus you need to exploit inequities in supply.demand.
Exact. Being contrarian is not so good and more often than not we didn't answer correctly to the question the thread asked. In fact, I'm not a contrarian in trading. I learned that I have to be a naive guy face to Mr. Market. I learned that I have to listen to him and do what he dictates me to do. I had been arguing with him and you know the rest.