Just in time for your last minute holiday shopping, our inaugural TradingMarkets Best Trading Books of 2011 is here with a few profit/loss-oriented page-turners for the trader or active investor in your life.
We’ve divided the best into two categories – “Must Reads” and “Should Reads” with a Winner and an Honorable Mention selection in each. We hope this will make it that much easier to decide which of the best trading books of 2011 you’ll be sending out as gifts this holiday season – and which ones you’re more likely to buy as “gifts” to yourself!
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Must Reads
Winner: Lee Hull – Less Risk, More Return: A Proven Blueprint for Retirement Plan Investing
Long time visitors at TradingMarkets.com might be surprised to find a book on “retirement plan investing” at the top of our best trading books of 2011.
But one of our criteria for the best trading book of the year was a book that would be important, must-reading for the widest variety of trader and investor possible. And whether you day-trade ETFs, swing trade options or trend trade stocks, making your trading strategy a contributing part of your overall investing and retirement strategy is critical.
Said Lee Hull in a conversation about the book with TradingMarkets.com earlier this year:
Ideally, we all have the same retirement goal: to retire on time with enough money, no matter what the stock market, the bond market does. Traditional portfolios are set up where they are only going to do well if we get a great 20-year run in stocks and bonds both. And that’s not in sync with people’s real goals. People’s real goal is to get ahead no matter what happens.
And that’s why you need to think, “What if the future is not as great as I think it’s going to be? Or what if returns are low single digits? Do I have my investments set up so I can still get ahead?”
In Less Risk, More Return, money manager Lee Hull shows how and why traditional investment advice and strategies have failed the average investor. By including alternative strategies, including short term, mean reversion strategies and maintaining high cash positions when market edges are few and far between, Lee Hull makes a compelling argument for short-term trading in the service of long-term investment.
Access an interview with Lee Hull at the link below.
Less Risk, More Return: The Big Saturday Interview with Lee Hull
And be sure to pick up a copy of Less Risk, More Return
here
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Honorable Mention: Michael Martin – The Inner Voice of Trading: Eliminate the Noise and Profit from the System and Strategies That Are Right for You
Every trader and investor has to learn how to cultivate the kind of positive, internal messaging that will keep you in the right trades and out of the wrong ones. At the end of the day, that’s not a mechanical decision. It’s a psychological one. An emotional one.
This insight is at the core of Michael Martin’s excellent book, The Inner Voice of Trading. Says Michael Martin, a 20-year veteran trader, “Discipline is just acting in accordance with your goals or your agreements with other people, despite the strong impulse to act otherwise. It all comes down to integrity, whether you use a computer to run your model or not.”
Access our Big Saturday Interview with Michael Martin at the link below.
The Inner Voice of Trading: The Big Saturday Interview with Michael Martin
Get your copy of The Inner Voice of Trading here.
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Should Reads
Winner: Aaron Brown – Red Blooded Risk: The Secret History of Wall Street
This recommendation comes straight from the Founder himself, Larry Connors. As he noted:
Aaron is a manager for AQR, a tremendously successful quantitative investment firm. As one reviewer recently wrote, Aaron lays out a convincing case that investors should spend much of their time looking for attractively priced “lottery tickets” – potential exponential growth that is underpriced by the market.
Pick up a copy of Red Blooded Risk here
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Honorable Mention: Satyajit Das – Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
Satyajit Das describes his book as a “cultural history of money and finance” in the age of fiat currencies and global financiers whose speculative decisions increasingly dictacte the pace and growth of national economies. Rather than being just another book on market crashes or the tyranny of financial power, Extreme Money seeks to explain how the modern financial system is as much our to control as it was ours to create in the first place.
Learn more about Extreme Money here
David Penn is Editor in Chief of TradingMarkets.com