Assistant Actuary??? I thought we were taking about a trader....someone who wants a career making real money and having the power of God?
Your best source of information is from the market itself. Books are great, but can reflect limited and dated understanding on the part of the author. In addition, the author's view and understanding of the world may actually hinder your development in some cases. Definately utilize the various resources out there, but also be sure to be committed to taking time to learn by observing the market. That way, you will be qualified to write your own book on current financial analysis, if you so desire. Start by asking yourself some basic questions and try to create a list of procedures and methods. This process will likely start out slow, but will inevitably lead to more questions and procedures. In time, you should reach a point where you will start seeing some predictive value in your developing model. Statistical learning without thoroughly understanding how the underlying system works can lead to unreliable results. For example, even where you robustly define performance metrics, you risk curve fitting issues if you leave a significant element out. Below is a partial list of topics that may have value for you to explore for the purposes of statistical modeling and analysis: Performance Metrics - At the most basic level, to goal is to risk as little as possible while maximizing potential profit. In addition, a reasonable goal is for a given opportunity to realize it's potential in a reasonable time frame. Trade scalability and or automation is likely to be a critical consideration for your employer. One must also be mindful of exceptional events causing instrument liquidity issues during critical times. An analysis of "Black Swan" events should give you broader perspective than some of your newer competition. Depending on time frame and scalability considerations, financial modeling involves many things including money flows between competing financial instruments, market dynamics, and fundamental considerations. By market dynamics, I mean the effect on prices of the various market participants over a given time frame. In my opinion, some the keys to understanding market action involve conditional probability and its closely related cousin, context. By context, I mean price action relative to a trend or trading range, relative to broader market action, or relative to an event. Having rock solid definitions of various market conditions is absolutely necessary in analyzing market action. Conditional probability, of course, involves the question of "given this set of circumstances, what is the probability of this financial instrument doing X". Is there predictive value of early session trading and final close and session or daily range? Does this predictive value change according to various contexts? You can get some good information and practice by downloading Open, High, Low, Close, and volume information of a financial instrument, related instrument, and a competing instrument over the time frame(s) you are interested into a spreadsheet. On daily or session data, you can develop basic to complex formulas to analyze this data. It will not be long for you to see some patterns and for more questions to come to your mind. In time, you may develop a sense of pricing certain events and policies on a given financial instrument either intuitively or through a well developed statistical model. As I'm sure you are aware, there are times that financial market performance seems to defy rational analysis. This is where historical analysis of extreme situations, gaming theory, and in depth knowledge of investment products, such as options, can help. Chess can be good intellectual practice for developing a plan to take advantage of an opponent's inefficiency. Poker is excellent for gaming theory. Although the expectancies of starting poker hands are well known, what are the actual expectancies of a given hand if a certain reasonably predictable player type does a certain action from a certain position? In many situations, opportunities for profit can be maximized by playing even linearly negative expectation starting hands and by possibly not playing linearly positive expectation starting hands, depending on the predictive value of your opponents actions or inactions. With options, you can either customize a trading plan to efficiently take advantage of certain scenarios and or use options extensively in your financial modeling, analysis, and trading. Real world expectancy is based on knowing and accounting for the various significant variables as related to the financial instrument being analyzed. Hopefully I have provided some general, but useful ideas as "food for thought" in your journey. Best wishes to you in your new career.