Bourquin & Mango, Traders at Work

As long-time readers of this blog undoubtedly know, I’m a sucker for interview-style books. Traders at Work: How the World’s Most Successful Traders Make Their Living in the Markets by Tim Bourquin and Nicholas Mango (Apress, 2013) may not be the best of the batch, but it’s an engaging read nonetheless.

The authors interviewed sixteen traders: Todd Gordon, Linda Raschke, Serge Berger, Alex Foster, Derek Schimming, Peter Brandt, Rob Wilson, John Carter, Anne-Marie Baiynd, Jeff White, Patrick Hemminger, Don Miller, Charles German, Andrew Menaker, Brian Lund, and Michael Toma. They trade a range of products, including forex, fixed income, equity futures, commodities, options, even just plain old stocks.

They tell war stories (for instance, how an options account quickly went from $150,000 down to $8,000) and share strategies. By and large they are technical traders, but naturally that encompasses many different approaches. They describe their typical trading day, the kind of research they do, the reports they write, their trade management style.

The authors have refrained from those cookie-cutter interviews that can transform people into dead wood. They’ve let the traders take the lead, and the result is a text that actually sounds like a series of (almost) impromptu conversations.

The final chapter of the book describes twenty habits of wealthy traders, including “Wealthy traders read about mobs, riots, and human psychology” and “Wealthy traders judge their trading success on anything but money.”

If you want insights into technical trading without reading a whole library of books, Traders at Work is a good shortcut.