All Trading Books

One of the best introductions to the "art" of day trading, Jake Bernstein's best-selling The Compleat Day Trader covers everything from getting started to understanding the intricacies of market analysis to tying it all together in a winning strategy.

User Reviews about The Compleat Day Trader: Trading Systems - Strategies - Timing Indicators and Analytical Methods

Day Trader; Stright talk on trading, systems, theories and common mistakes. Very strait talk on the likelyhood you will lose lots of your money learning. But for those who perserviere and learn from their mistakes and completely manage their fear and greed, a person can learn to make more money in some trades, than is lost on the other trades. Good book to start with but DON"T START TRADING until you read a lot and really prepare! You will pay for ALL the mistakes you could have avoided. -- Day Trader;Stright talk on trading, systems, theories and mistakes

The book is good if you want to depend on technical strategies to make money day trading.

The stock market is always presenting us with trading opportunities that don't neccesarily have to do anything with technical analisys.

As a day trader your homework is all about studying and testing different market strategies that will help you take advantage of stocks and at the same time protect your investments. Just always keep in mind that a good strategy is simple and practical. Complicated technical systems will always make you slow in your decision making process or confuse you right from the start.

There are very good sites on the web where you can access practical trading strategies that are easy to implement. One of those sites is Stress Free Traders ( StressFreeTraders com)

They focus on short term day trading strategies that can help you pick and approach momentum stocks while reducing your trading risk.

All in all, day trading is all about picking the best stock opportunities and deciding when to buy and when to sell with ease and simplicity. Once you learn to master your trading decisions, you can aspire to obtain consistent profitable results.
-- To much technical stuff. Needs practical ideas

Most books for "day traders" are so general that their techniques and advice can be successfully used by swing-traders (those who keep stocks for several days), and even by longer-term investors. This one is different. The author, Jake Bernstein, strongly advocates real day trading, when no securities ever kept overnight. Therefore, his techniques are usable for very short term trading only.

The advantage of this book is that it has very little general rhetoric and comes straight to the point, that is to the techniques which the author finds profitable. Basically, 90% of the book is about the use of technical indicators (such as various moving averages and oscillators) to determine potentially profitable entry and exit points. The topics discussed in particular detailed manner are the use of moving averages, stochastic indicator, moving average channel (MAC), relative strength index (RSI), momentum, and techniques for trading of opening gaps. The author also suggests several oscillators of his own. However, despite the simplicity of these indicators, one has to own software such as Omega Research Trade Station to calculate and plot these home-made oscillators in real time, or write a program yourself. There are also several chapters applicable to futures only (actually, the whole book is about trading in the futures market, but 95% of techniques are equally applicable to stocks).

The great advantage of the book is that it is very specific, clearly illustrated, and gives plenty of detailed technical advice and a number of potentially profitable trading techniques. Be advised, however, that those who are interested in trading but do not have enough capital to take profits from half-a-tick changes (and I, too, belong to this group) cannot really take advantage of this book. No trend and no trade longer than a few hours is discussed there! Therefore, this book is for the serious day traders, and only for them. If you are a day trader, this book is a must; if you are not, do not bother buying it but rather consider other options, e.g., the excellent book "How to get started in electronic day trading" by D.S.Nassar which is good for traders on any time frame. -- For hardcore day traders, and straight to the point