Recommended Reading | The Three Books I Always Recommend

My list of book recommendations is short. Further, my list does not include the typical titles. But the question is asked many times, "What books do you recommend" and my inclinations to be lazy and have something handy are so great, I figured that I'd do a post. Plus I was able to use the cute picture of Minnah.

• Psychology of the Stock Market, G. C. Selden: A 1914 copyright date reminds you as you reading it that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Though I recommend your buying this slim volume, it can be downloaded from Google books here.

• Secrets to Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets, Stan Weinstein. The charts in the book are not of the quality that our contemporary eye would hold them to. I wished the book would get updated. But this book is the best "must read" for new investors/traders.

• The Nature of Risk, Justin Mamis. This book will inform your thinking about risk in the market and cultivate an understanding of time risk, price risk and information risk.
  

(Side note: I read Weinstein long before I discovered Mamis. And in reading Mamis, I was struck that Weinstein's book spoke about similar principles. I later learned that Weinstein became the editor of Mamis's The Professional Tape Reader. For fans of Helen Meisler, she was mentioned in the forward to one of Mamis's books. He was her mentor--"the very best mentor one could have.")

I'm now going to add a fourth book to the the trio above:

• Beating the Stock Market, R. W. McNeel. Another oldie--1924. It's a slim volume that reminds us that while the market seems complicated, it really isn't. I will forgive his chapter on Women, Poor Losers.
  

I particularly recommend these older books to people prone to thinking about the market as something rigged against them by ranting against the proverbial "They". Both McNeel and Selden's books address this sinister "They". Both authors opine, and I paraphrase, that it is the hobgoblin of minds that do not understand the speculative process. I believe them to be correct, and I note that the folks that rail the most against this so-called "They" are the ones that have the least success.

Best to free our minds of such shadows. The greatest force that prevents our being successful in the market is ourselves.