Books like Super Trader — picked by fans

Of all the books about trading written over the decades, perhaps none is still so beloved, revered, and followed as this 1923 classic by journalist Edwin Lefèvre. Although technically a work of fiction, the book really is about the life and trading style of one of the greatest speculators of all time, Jesse Livermore (told under the guise of “Larry Livingston”).

What makes this book such a treasure is not just its fun prose, and interesting glimpse into what the process of investing in old exchanges and “bucket shops” was over a century ago, when ticker-tape and board boys with chalk and ladders were one’s only information about market prices, but also how the mind of one of the world’s greatest traders worked.

This book offers many gems of knowledge about trading—based upon the general principle that, although methods and technologies change, human nature does not and therefore “there is… show more.

William O’Neil’s How To Make Money In Stocks is great for anyone looking to learn how to trade stocks part-time.

It gives you a framework of what actually causes stocks to make the big moves of 300%, 500%, 1,000% or more over the span of a few months to a few years along with a historical perspective of why they move the way they move and a strategy of how to take advantage of it that doesn’t require tuning into the news or being glued to a PC all day.

One of the big things you’ll learn in O’Neil’s book is that modeling success is key. The book starts out with over 100 pages of annotated charts of the biggest winning stocks in history. What you’ll quickly notice is that history repeats itself, over and over again.

This is another book by a short-term trader. And it reads like a novel. It’s truly a fascinating book about making money in the stock market. Darvas is honest and talks about how lucky he has been on many occasions. What I love most is that this book is from 1960! It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme or whatever.

Darvas, who passed away in 1977, was actually a professional dancer who loved trading stocks. He didn’t try to sell his ideas. He simply wrote an honest account of how he made his money. Much of his knowledge on investing is self-learned, which is how most ordinary folks learn about the stock market. That’s why I highly recommend his book.

Mark Minervini’s Think and Trade Like A Champion solidifies the lessons in Darvas, O’Neil, and Tharp and takes it to a whole other level! Mark is one of the big reasons why I was finally able to put everything together, find my own success, and do it all while still working the 9-5. This book changed my life.

In Think and Trade Like a Champion you’ll learn the finer details and nuances of chart patterns (what to look for and how to trade them) and what to avoid, the sizing and risk management strategies that helped Mark win multiple US Investing Championships including how to manage the reward to risk relationship, mindset, plus a whole lot more.

Mark has written several books and I recommend studying each of them. Think and Trade Like A Champion is my personal favorite.

Mark also wrote the Foreword to my book.

Firstly, I absolutely love that this book is presented in the form of a podcast!

Maybe it’s just me, but epistolary novels always makes me feel the story is more “real”! I love how Wesolowski cleverly blurs the lines between madness, evil, and the paranormal, asking whether “monsters” really exist or are simply manifestations of our human selves.

This resonates so much with me as a clinical psychologist, because mental illness have been demonised and “monstered” throughout history, and I am always working to educate and defeat stereotypes and stigma.

I loved the television play based on this novel, and the novel itself is equally good as a sensitive but somewhat mordant commentary on marriage, widowerhood, wartime memories, and the English class system.

I found it amusing in parts but also quite sad, and empathized with both main characters—two men who had served in WW2 as squadron leader and sergeant, respectively. They meet fifty years later in the Tonbridge Wells hospital when both their wives are dying, and develop an unlikely friendship.

This is not a best-seller graphic novel, you don’t see this book on every bookstore shelf. I discovered it because of Nina Mickwitz’s Documentary Comics. I ordered it from the library network that we had at my grad school. My degeneration is a Jewel of a book in many senses, it is a sincere book, a dialogue that goes through many channels: the images drawn, the text typed, and the way the book was made. The shifting in the line makes you think about the process and the author not just as a character but as a person experiencing the world from certain conditions and telling you about that experience.

Psychology is easy to misunderstand. When I decided it was going to be my undergraduate major, it was because I wanted to understand how the mind worked, broadly, what makes people tick, and how they can be guided or helped when they get stuck or have problems. I assumed this knowledge existed and that majoring in psychology would reveal it to me. 

I was more than surprised when I attended my first psychology class. The professor sat cross-legged on top of a desk. He had long hair and a beard (unusual in 1963), and he spoke as if he had just taken a drug, which he likely had. He used profane language, the first time I had heard that word in a public place. He blathered for about 30 minutes, saying nothing of importance to the subject I was interested in. 

I stayed in the class and continued the major… show more.

A houseful of women, moving from their long-term home in New Zealand to a new location by the sea. What you get in this short tale is an accumulation of moments that add up to an intense mosaic of the life of women in a male-dominated family.

From the little girl Kezia to the pregnant wife Linda, from the sometimes benevolent grandmother to the handyman who chops off the head of a live duck to see it still running, this book enthralls in its detail, its poetic and emotional resonance, and the insights it gives into female consciousness in a world of constrictions.

Don’t look for ‘what happens next’; look instead for the diamond facets the story reveals in every sentence. When you get to the end, you may feel that this book is a jewel beyond price. 

The title appeals to me, and the list of books I love is overwhelming. I’m rounding out my recs with this out-of-print, self-help book published in 1939 that I came across it in a second-hand bookstore. You can open the guide to almost any page and find something simple and deep, or if not, old phraseology like, Preventing Unwholesome Behavior Due to Tedium, is amusing. Technology may be changing the way people meet and how we process information, but we have most of the same emotional needs as before.