Flamatory, how does it compare to "Tragedy & Hope" by Carroll Quigley? It sounds similar from your description.

T.L.O.H. is very brief (only 100 small pages), and attempts more to summarize and draw conclusions from history

Although I have never read it, Tragedy looks much more in depth - what did you think of it?

It would probably compare to my other all time favorite book "Ideas - A history of thought from fire to Frued" by Peter Watson - A monumentally good book that is HUGE in scope, has fantastic analysis, and excellent writing...
http://www.amazon.com/Ideas-History-Thou....

I thought it was befitting exactly the description you had given your title recommendation except in 1300 pages.

Okay - still a noobie but I got the Gold to get the videos. I need a basic book/reference to really understand KD's daily chart lectures. I'm getting it over time, but I'd rather really know EXACTLY what he's referring to at all times.

Anything comprehensive out there that covers all the bases for the things he shows us? It can be dry as hell (I expect it would be), but that is fine for me.

In order of what a green pea should read:

1) Pit Bull - Marty Schwartz - The market is not efficient and you can get paid because of it.
2) Trade Your Way To Financial Freedom - Van K. Tharp - Define your style and organize it.
3) The Alchemy of Finance - George Soros - Identify self-reinforcing trends

Equity Specific Books
1) Running Money - Andy Kessler - Look for price-collapsing ideas that scale.

Entertainment/Short Reads
1) Market Wizard Trilogy - Jack Schwager - Can be read one chapter at a time.
2) Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis - The "investor" is the mark.
3) Reminiscences of a Stock Operator - Edwin Lefevre - Classic
4) Wall Street Meat - Andy Kessler - The "investor" is the mark.

History
1) Wall Street: A History from it's beginnings to the fall of Enron - Charles Geisst

Entertainment/Short Reads

Den Of Thieves

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists _ Robert Tressell



"There is no other novel quite like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. George Orwell called it 'a wonderful book'; its readers have become a living part of its remarkable history.

Tressell's novel is about survival on the underside of the Edwardian Twilight, about exploitative employment when the only safety nets are charity, workhouse, and grave. Following the fortunes of a group of painters and decorators and their families, and the attempts to rouse their political will by the Socialist visionary Frank Owen, the book is both a highly entertaining story and a passionate appeal for a fairer way of life.

It asks questions that are still being asked today: why do your
wages bear no relation to the value of your work? Why do fat cats get richer when you don't? Tressell's answers are 'The Great Money Trick' and the 'philanthropy' of an unenlightened workforce, who give away their rights and aspirations to a decent life so freely."

Intellectually enlightening, deeply moving and gloriously funny (complete with exploding clergyman), The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a book that changes lives.

This is the only Book I have ever read that made me question things I had always taken for granted...great book

"The Tao of Pooh"...because Pooh just "is".

Out of print and not really for beginners, Pacelli's "The Speculator's Edge" does something remarkable: it defines what your job is as a trader and why that job is important to the financial system. Absolutely essential if you really want to understand both sides of a trade.

http://www.amazon.com/Speculators-Edge-S....

I just got done reading "The Fourth Turning" by William Strauss and Neil Howe, on a recommendation from somebody here on TF. This book unscrambled my entire education and world view. These guys have done some incredible research on the cycles of history. If I was a high school/college history instructor, this would be the one required text book. It's like the master syllabus.

What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars, by Jim Paul and Brendan Moynihan
http://infraredpress.com/

The thesis of the book is, there are many different successful strategies for making money in the markets, but the one thing they have in common is disciplined loss limitation. An exerpt, from after the author finished recounting how he lost his $1.6M fortune and seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange back in the mid 80s:

Quote:

It was a painful realization to discover that I wasn't a trader. I didn't have the patience or mechanical skills to be a successful floor trader, nor the consistency to be a successful upstairs trader. If I was going to learn how to make money trading, I was going to have to find out how others had done it. I went and read the books and articles about, and interviews with, sucessful market professionals. I studied the best investors and traders from Wall Street and La Salle Street: Peter Lynch, Bernard Baruch, Jim Rogers, Paul Tudor Jones, Richard Dennis and many more. After all, when you're sick you want to consult the best doctors, and when you're in trouble you want the advice of the best lawyers. So, I consulted what the successful pro's had to say about making money in the markets. If I could figure out how they did it, I could still pull off getting rich again. And this time I would keep the money.

Below is some of the advice the pros offered for making money.

Advice and Dissent:

'I haven't met a rich technician.' - Jim Rogers

'I always laugh at people who say, 'I've never met a rich technician.' I love that! It is such an arrogant, nonsensical response. I used fundamentals for nine years and then got rich as a technician.' - Marty Schwartz

'Diversify your investments.' - John Templeton

'Diversification is a hedge for ignorance.' - William O'Neil

'Concentrate your investments.' - Warren Buffet

Averaging a Loss:

'You have to understand the business of a company you have invested in, or you will not know whether to buy more if it goes down.' - Peter Lynch

'Averaging down is an amateur strategy that can produce serious losses.' - William O'Neil

'Don't try to buy at the bottom or sell at the top.' - Bernard Baruch

'Maybe the trend is your friend for a few minutes in Chicago, but for the most part it is rarely a way to get rich.' - Jim Rogers

'I believe the very best money is made at the market turns. Everyone says you get killed trying to pick tops and bottoms and you make all the money by catching the trends in the middle. Well, for twelve years I have often missing the meat in the middle, but I have caught a lot of bottoms and tops.' - Paul Tudor Jones

Spreading Up:

'When you're not sure what is going to happen in the market it is wise to protect yourself by going short in something you think is overvalued.' - Roy Neuberger

'Whether I am bullish or bearish, I always try to have both long and short positions - just in case I'm wrong.' - Jim Rogers

'I have tried being long a stock and short a stock in the same industry, but generally found it to be unsuccessful.' - Michael Steinhardt

'Many traders have the idea that when they are in a commodity (or stock), and it starts to decline, they can hedge and protect themselves, that is, short some other commodity (or stock) and make up the loss. There is no greater mistake than this.' - W.D. Gann

I had expected there might be some subtle differences among the pros. After all, some were stock market moguls, while others traded options or futures contracts. But didn't these guys agree on anything? Based on the examples above, they sounded more like members of a debate team trying to score points against each other.

I had to find out how the pros made money in the markets. I had to learn the secret that all of them must know. But if the pros couldn't agree on how to make money, how was I going to learn their secret? And then it began to occur to me: there was no secret. They didn't all do the same thing to make money. What one guy said not to do, another guy said you should do. Why didn't they agree? I mean, here was a group of individuals who had collectively taken billions of dollars out of the markets and kept it. Weren't they all doing at least a few things the same when they made their money? And if the first guy hadn't lost, why didn't the second guy?

If imitating the pros was supposed to make you rich and not imitating them was supposed to make you poor, then each one of these guys should have lost all his money because none of them imitated each other. They all should be flat broke b/c they very often did things opposite of each other. It finally occurred to me that maybe studying losses was more important than searching for some Holy Grail to making money. So I started reading through all the material on the pros again and noted what they had to say about losses.

Losses:

'My basic advice is don't lose money.' - Jim Rogers

'I'm more concerned about controlling the downside. Learn to take the losses. The most important thing in making money is not letting your losses get out of hand.' - Marty Schwartz

'I'm always thinking about losing money as opposed to making money. Don't focus on making money; focus on protecting what you have.' - Paul Tudor Jones

'One investor's two rules of investing:
1. Never lose money.
2. Never forget rule #1.' - Warren Buffet

'The majority of unskilled investors stubbornly hold onto their losses when the losses are small and reasonable. They could get out cheaply, but being emotionally involved and human, they keep waiting and hoping until their loss gets much bigger and costs them dearly.' - William O'Neil

'Learn how to take losses quickly and cleanly. Don't expect to be right all the time. If you have a mistake, cut your loss as quickly as possible.' - Bernard Baruch

Now I was getting somewhere. Why was I trying to learn the secret to making money when it could be done in so many different ways? I knew something about how to make money, I had made a million dollars in the market. But I didn't know anything about how not to lose. The pros could all make money in contradictory ways because they all knew how to control their losses. While one person's method was making money, another person with an opposite approach would be losing - if the second person was in the market. And that's just it; the second person wouldn't be in the market. He'd be on the sidelines with a nominal loss. The pros consider it their primary responsibility to not lose money.

The moral of course is that just as there is more than one way to deal blackjack, there is more than one way to make money in the markets. Obviously, there is no secret way to make money because because the pros have done it using very different, often contradictory, approaches. Learning how not to lose money is more important than learning how to make money. Unfortunately, the pros didn't explain how to go about acquiring this skill. So I decided to study loss in general, and my losses in particular, to see if I could determine the root causes of losing money in the markets. As I said at the very beginning of this book, I may not be wise, but I am now very smart. I eventually did learn from my mistakes.

At the beginning of the book he said, "Smart people learn from their mistakes. Wise people learn from others' mistakes". The rest of the book is an examination of the psychological and emotional reasons for the distorting biases, poor judgement, and bad decisions that lead to loss and failure, as well as a strategy for avoiding that.

If I had to pick one, it would be the first, but realistically you won't be able to do it with just one book. Here is the list of books that I recommend:

"Come into my Trading Room" ~ Alexander Elder
http://www.amazon.com/Come-Into-My-Tradi....

"Entries and Exits: Visits to 16 Trading Rooms " ~ Alexander Elder
http://www.amazon.com/Entries-Exits-Visi....

"Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets" ~ John J. Murphy
http://www.amazon.com/Technical-Analysis....

"Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom" ~ Van K. Tharp
http://www.amazon.com/Trade-Your-Way-Fin....

"Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns" ~ Thomas N. Bulkowski
http://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Chart....

"Trading in the Zone" ~ Mark Douglas
http://www.amazon.com/Trading-Zone-Confi....

"Profit with Options" ~ Lawrence G. McMillan
http://www.amazon.com/Profit-Options-Ess....

"The Only Three Questions that Count" ~ Ken Fisher
http://www.amazon.com/Only-Three-Questio....

enjoy

I've read many of the works listed here. While many of them are great, I think some could be intimidating to the noob.

If you are really green, I suggest reading Toni Turner's books (http://www.toniturner.com/} for beginners: Beginner's Guide to Day Trading Online and Beginner's Guide to Short Term Trading. I read both three times when starting out and thought they were well-written, precise, and answered more questions than they prompted.

Also loved the Market Wizards books but they won't help someone really green.

Ads, your link is broken, there's a %7D (for the } ) at the end that's throwing it off.

Thanks, Kurtosis, let's try this:

http://www.toniturner.com

Yup, you can edit the link in first post too, with the edit button on the left, under your userid.

Another vote for "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator". This book tells of trading stories from the early part of the 20th century. Because of this you might think it wouldn't be of any use to you today. And you'd be very, very wrong.

Its fascinating to see the same sort of crap happening today happened decades ago, right down to the public always getting sheared. The bullish financial press, the vilification of shorts (the author wonders, "Why don't the bullish rumor mongers/pumpers ever get arrested?" Sound familiar?). The author notes that the public actually makes money in the late stages of a boom (when they enter). The problem is that they then hold down those shares all the way down when the boom ends. There are so many universal market truths in this book that you'll end up thinking that nothing ever really changes.

I've thought "Traders, Guns, and Money" and "Infectious Greed", were the books I'd recommend first, but this one knocked them both down a spot.

Last Thursday after work I was visiting an old friend of mine when his neighbors walked by. I was in the middle of my normal rant about how bad things are going to get. The neighbor had some soft spoken but very intelligent remarks. He went back to his house and returned with two books he had written on option trading.
His Name is Kenneth Trester and the books are The Complete Option Trader and 101 Tips to Option Trading.
I have read the first one hundred pages of his first book and they seem to be very optimistic. Does anyone know if these books are worth reading or am I reading the equivalent of some buy real estate for no money down books?

I just finished "the secret science of price and volume" by timothy ord and it is worth the time and money. As with all books take what works for you from it. It is not the only book that is worth reading but most of the other good books i have read are already posted.

The Evolution of Civilizations - An Introduction to Historical Analysis (1979)
Author: Carroll Quigley

Quote:

In this perceptive look at the factors behind the rise and fall of civilizations, Professor Quigley seeks to establish the analytical tools necessary for understanding history. He examines the application of scientific method to the social sciences, then establishes his historical hypotheses. He poses a division of culture into six levels, from the more abstract to the more concrete; intellectual, religious, social, political, economic, and military; and he identifies seven stages of historical change for all civilizations: mixture, gestation, expansion, conflict, universal empire, decay, and invasion. Quigley tests these hypotheses by a detailed analysis of five major civilizations: the Mesopotamian, the Canaanite, the Minoan, the classical, and the Western.

and you can read it online for free,

http://www.archive.org/download/CarrollQ....

You can also find a lot of books online for free:

http://www.rapidfind.org/upload/showthre....

I'm not a trader. 30 years from now i hope to have a cost basis in the pennies on my holdings. That said, I'm shocked only one post mentioned The Alchemy of Finance by Soros. It's not exactly a book on trading, but if you want to learn how the game is played, I strongly recommend it.
unmentioned as of yet, The Millionaire Next Door, Stanley and Danko. Won't teach you a damn thing about trading.

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles Morris is a good read. This guy does a good job of covering the credit crisis and throws in some startling revelations. Great explanations of CDO's, CDS's, etc.

CDO. Cum Dumpster Overflow. and they paid good money for it!!!

New to trading any suggestions metrail to pick up for TA?