Adrian Reid describes his early phase of buying many trading books while searching for workable methods. He highlights three influential recommendations: the Market Wizards series (Jack Swager) for learning what not to do and eliminating incompatible trading lifestyles; Way of the Turtle by Curtis Faith as a clear, powerful guide to systematic trading; and Van Tharp’s Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom for position sizing and risk management. He credits Tharp’s book with preventing blow-ups and notes a longer curated list of ~40 recommended books on enlightenedstocktrading.com.
Chapters
There was a time where I was ordering boxes of books, trading books from Amazon. And it was like Christmas every other day at my house. I would get like a box because I was just looking for answers. And I go, I bought everything that I could find on technical analysis on systematic trading on trading strategies. And these are. Sorry, these ones are some of the ones that, that I deemed worth keeping. There was a lot that ended up in the trash or in the recycling. A couple that were really powerful on my journey. There's several books in the Market Wizards series by Jack Swager, and they are interviews with pro traders. And I learned a lot about what I didn't want to do because there's many different ways to make money in the markets. And I looked at some of those, some of those interviews, and I thought, there is no way I would ever trade like that because that person never sleeps. There's one story about a guy that had charts in his bathroom, had trading screens in his bathroom, trading screens in his bedroom, like all through the house. Because he always had to be not monitoring what was going on. It's like, forget that. That's like, no way I want to run my life like that. And so the reason it was so powerful is because I used it to eliminate a whole bunch of methods that just don't fit with normal people's lives. You know, the people interviewed are not normal. Like they are the unicorns. Right. But it allowed me to find systematic trading and that then allowed me to dive deep on systematic trading. So I would say market wizards books are good. Way of the Turtle by Curtis Faith is a really powerful book on systematic trading. Curtis was one of the original turtles. He was one of the most successful. Unfortunately, later in life he made some very bad decisions and I don't think he's doing so well now, but I'm not sure. But that book is very well written, very clear and really powerful. Van Tharp, Trade your Way to Financial Freedom was instrumental in my informing my views on risk management and position sizing. I can say that book kept me alive in the financial markets and prevented me from blowing up and losing everything. So that was really powerful. I have other books. There's a. If you go to enlightened stock trading.com trading books, I list 40 there which are worth reading.
