Prateek Shuklaon 12 Jun 2007 at 9:43 pm
Hi,
Can you suggest any books that give may be helpful for someone like myself who would like to get into trading but has never done this before, something that gives a complete guide to products, markets, instruments as well as strategies.
thanks
PS
Hi Prateek,
This is how I started my wealth creation path:
What I Didn’t Learn At School But Wish I Had
If you are more interested in technical books, during my university studies in derivatives investment strategies I used,
An Introduction to Derivatives and Risk Management – Don M. Chance… This is a very DEEP book and have most of the advaced strategies but not all, I think after reading this book you will be confused and very afraid of trading options because its very theory based and not very practical (ie. it does not teach you how to make money from applying the strategies, it teaches you that its risky to make money)
optionsXpress has pretty good information on basic options with examples, surprisingly, they also have advanced strategies although you have to open an account… the good thing is that its FREE to open an optionsXpress account! Note: They close your account after a few months if you don’t put money in it though…

To do what i’ve done, I didn’t read uni books… i google most of it, attended seminars and studied from home study materials. If you are really serious, I higly recommend
Mastery of Stock Market Intelligence It will teach you all about options, how to draw trend lines, how to rent shares, sell insurance from anywhere in the world where you have a computer and internet.
I hope this was helpful, I personally had to unteach myself a lot of information that was taught to me during my derivative units at uni. The books didn’t teach anything about margin requirements that is used in real life and it taught me you can’t make lots of money because it would mean you are taking high risk.
eg. If a share is $10 and you only had $10 you would be able to buy 1 stock, and risking $10 and you are praying it goes up. Instead I go to the market and buy insurance on the stock for 25c, I could buy insurance for 40 stocks risking $10, then borrow $400 to buy 40 stocks fully insured and rent them out at 40c making $16 minus interest of $4 (12%pa) i have very minimal risk and double my bank in 1 month using extreme leverage and risk management. The most important point in this example is that I only need $10 to do both strategy! (There’s different wants to get leverage, ie using the same money to get more… ie. same risk more money)
They don’t teach you that in a book! You go to seminars to learn these things or learn from people who are doing it… once you find your network of options trader/writers you will get invited to many seminars/events that teaches you how to make more money with what you got… I think this is the reason why the rich get richer… i guess bird of a feather flock together. I find it difficult telling people about what I do especially when i’m quoting 20-30% a month or 100% a year return, they just call me crazy, that i’m an idiot for trying, i’m going to lose all my money one day and my favourite… what i’m doing is worse than gambling. Nowadays, I don’t waste my time telling them the details, they can ask me if they are interested.
PS: the above example requires portfolio margining aka the greatest thing that ever happened in the world!