Recommended Reading

I thought I'd set up a list of books that I have read and can recommend. I'll keep this page updated and have a link from a perma-link to it.


Way of the Turtle


A book I keep referring to. This book gives a great insight into the world of trading by one of a select group of millionaire traders. Although it is focussed on the financial markets, e.g. options trading, futures trading, etc, there is so much that can be applied to bet trading.
The sections on Behavioural finance and the work of Kahnman and Tversky are worth reading. The book covers the methods the turtle group used to make millions. The methods are simple and seem mainly concerned with building mechanical trading systems that remove the emotional side. Having just lost pretty heavilly (in terms of proportion of bank) due to these very issues (not being mechanical enough), I can only relate to it more.

The New Market Wizards

This was the book that lead me to the "Way of the Turtle". In this book, author Jack Schwager, interviews some of America's top traders. Not just those who have brought in the most money, but those who have performed consistently over the years (see next book, to discover why just basing on most money is not a valid reason).
A really interesting book and one that hammers home the same points about getting away from emotional trading and escaping from the herd mentality.

Fooled by Randomness

This was a real eye opener to me. The premise of this book is that we (including many mathematicians, statisticians, business people, me, you, pretty much most people), just don't really understand randomness and make wrong assumptions, that can have real bad repercussions. The author talks a lot about traders (as this is also his background) who after making a lot of money "blew up" and lost all they had made and lots more due to what the deemed were unprobable events. Written in a very conversational tone and with personality. An eye opener and a must read for anyone involved in an area that involves randomness.