14 min · 12 chaptersNarrated in your voice
What it's about
Jack Schwager interviewed roughly thirty traders in futures, stocks, and options who produced extraordinary, sustained returns during the 1970s and 1980s, asking each how they did it. The book argues, through their own words rather than statistical proof, that markets are not perfectly efficient and that disciplined individuals with a defined edge and strict risk control can beat them repeatedly. It became a foundational text for a generation of professional and retail traders.
Read a little every day
15 min a day
1 days · done Sun, Oct 18
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- A futures or stock trader who has a method but no consistent risk-control discipline - An investor curious whether the efficient-market hypothesis leaves any room for skill - A finance student who wants trading philosophy in practitioners' own words rather than textbook theory
What’s inside
- 1The Premise: Can Markets Be Beaten?1 min
Schwager's core claim—that determined individuals can consistently beat the market—directly challenges the academic efficient-market view, though the book offers testimony rather than statistical proof.
- 2Cutting Losses and Riding Winners: The Trend Followers1 min
Sustainable profitability in the commodity traders' accounts came less from correctly predicting direction than from a mechanical willingness to exit losing trades immediately and let winning trades run far longer than intuition would allow.
- 3Betting Big When You're Right: The Discretionary Macro Traders1 min
Bruce Kovner and Paul Tudor Jones show that outsized returns can come from concentrated, high-conviction bets, but only when position size is calculated from a predefined risk limit rather than from confidence in the forecast.
- 4Can Trading Be Taught? The Turtle Experiment1 min
Richard Dennis's Turtle program suggests that trading discipline is a teachable skill rather than an innate gift, though the varied results among his trainees complicate that claim.
- 5Risk of Ruin: Why Position Sizing Matters More Than Prediction1 min
Larry Hite's practice of capping every single trade's potential loss at roughly one percent of capital demonstrates that survival mathematics, not superior forecasting, is the real precondition for long-term compounding.
- 6From Ego to Discipline: The Psychological Turn1 min
Marty Schwartz's shift from years of failure as a fundamental Wall Street analyst to championship-level trading shows that psychological detachment from being right matters more than analytical sophistication.
- 7Growth Stocks and Charts: The Equity Specialists1 min
William O'Neil and David Ryan's CANSLIM approach shows that the futures traders' core discipline—cut losses at a fixed threshold—applies equally to stock picking, even when the entry criteria come from fundamentals rather than trend signals.
- 8History Over Charts: The Contrarian Global Investor1 min
Jim Rogers's career argues that deep historical and geopolitical research, applied contrarily against consensus positioning, can be a legitimate and distinct edge from either technical trend-following or short-term fundamental stock analysis.
- 9What the Winners Have in Common1 min
Across radically different markets and methods, the traders in this book converge on a shared underlying temperament—rigorous risk control, willingness to admit error quickly, and a method built to fit their own personality rather than copied from someone else.
About Jack D. Schwager
Jack D. Schwager is a financial researcher and hedge fund industry veteran who spent decades studying futures and derivatives markets, including work as a research director and fund-of-funds manager. He is best known for the Market Wizards interview series, which he continued in several sequels over the following three decades.
