If you want to become a serious day trader you have to get obsessed with education and constant improvement. You have to have a thirst for information and knowledge. The financial markets evolve over time and as a result, you have to be willing and ready to do the same with your trading.
In this post, we have compiled a list of the best day trading books for you to read if you want to become a professional trader. The lessons in each book can add a new perspective to your trading strategy and help you improve your trading overall.
Let’s dive right in!
1.) How to Day Trade for a Living: By Andrew Aziz
Why You Should Read This Book
How to Day Trade For a Living is one of the most popular books on day trading. It’s great for novice traders who want to build a solid foundation and learn some of the most popular trading techniques, setups, and industry jargon.
Some of the things you will learn inside this book include:
- Trading Psychology
- Money Management in trading
- How Day Trading Works
- Risk and Account Management
- How to Find Stocks to Trade
- Best Tools and Platforms
- Introduction to Candlesticks
- Paper trading
These are some of the essentials you need to learn about before you start live trading and this book does a great job of helping you build a solid foundation in your trading journey.
Quote From the Book:
“This means that recognizing trade patterns is important, but execution is equally important.”
Andrew Aziz
2.) Day Trading Quick-Start Guide: Troy Noonan
Why You Should Read This Book
The Day Trading Quick-Start Guide is perfect for complete beginners in trading. It’s also a great source of knowledge for existing traders who want to improve their trading skills and learn ways to improve their profitability.
What you will learn in this book:
- Day trading fundamentals you need to know before you start trading
- Technical indicators and technical analysis
- How to interpret charts and what to avoid
- Trading psychology and how to manage your trading losses
- The basics of the derivatives market
Quotes From the Book:
One time, I had a large order for cases of canned pizza sauce, and my customer refused to pay me upon delivery, as we had agreed.
Troy Noonan
3.) The Complete Turtle Trader: By Michael W. Covel
Why You Should Read This Book
The Complete Turtle Trader is the true story of Wall Street legend Richard Dennis, and his disciples, known as the “turtles”. The book is about the trading techniques that he taught them and how they used them to become millionaires in a very short period of time.
He believed that anyone could learn how to trade if they could follow a simple ruled-based system. In the book, he breaks down his turtle trader system and rules and how you can follow them to become successful in your trading.
Some of the things you will learn in his book include:
- His trading philosophy
- The rules to the turtle trading system
- The best types of stocks to trade
- Proper risk management and position sizing
- Some of his successful turtles
It’s a great book on trading if you want to learn how to follow carefully designed trading rules and proper risk management techniques to preserve capital.
Quotes From the Book:
“Science is about proving things wrong, it’s not about proving things right. What you’re trying to do is break your strategy.”
Micheal W. Covel
4.) How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market: By Nicolas Darvas
Why You Should Read This Book
This book is a timeless classic in trading. It’s the story of Nicolas Darvas, a dancer who became a self-taught trader who experienced serious success in trading in the early ’60s of the stock market. Without any prior knowledge of stocks and trading, Nicolas Darvas came up with his trading strategy known as the “Box Theory”.
His strategy was extremely useful and helped him achieve massive success. This book is highly recommended to read because it teaches you about the psychology and perseverance in day trading.
Some of the lessons you will learn in this book:
- How statistics help to shape trading
- His famous Box Theory method
- How his trading losses helped him understand stocks and their behavior
- The importance of controlling your trading losses
Quotes From the Book:
“There are no good or bad stocks, there are only rising and falling stocks.”
Nicolas Darvas
5.) Price Action Breakdown: Laurentiu Damir
Why You Should Read This Book
Price Action Breakdown is great book to read once you have your basics down. It focuses on teaching you how to interpret and trade based primarily on price action. It contains lessons to help you truly understand what price action is and how it works in any type of market.
This book is best suited for traders with some experience who are willing to hone in on their craft and take their trading to the next level.
Some of the lessons you will get out of this book include:
- How to find the trading volume by analyzing price action movement by itself without any fancy trading indicators or tools.
- Develop a clear market structure and know why the price is moving in a certain direction.
- Pick out institutional flow apart from the retail flow
Quotes From the Book:
People’s fear or greed makes them act in predictable patterns.
Laurentiu Damir
6.) Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets: John J. Murphy
Why You Should Read This Book
Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets is a great book if you want to learn technical analysis at the professional level. This book is packed full of useful information about technical analysis specifically related to the futures markets. It’s excellent if you plan on trading futures. This book is a little more advanced than all of our other suggestions and it’s typically intended for traders who have experience trading in different markets.
What you will learn in this book:
- The basics of price charts
- The core components of trends
- How to interpret volume and open interest in the futures markets
- Different types of moving averages
- Candlestick patterns
Another great component of this book is that it features tests and quizzes to test your understanding of the concepts discussed in the book.
These are some of the best day trading books to help you get started with trading and also to help you improve your skills if you are an experienced trader. Trading takes some serious time and commitment to not only learn. Becoming a profitable trader takes experience, sacrifice, and long hours wondering why you didn’t set stop losses.
Quotes From the Book:
“It should be stressed here again, however, that basic trend analysis is still the overriding consideration.”
John J. Murphy
7.) Mastering The Trade: John Carter
Why You Should Read This Book
This the best trading book if you want to perfect your trading set-ups and with proven strategies and rules. John Carter is a legend in trading and carefully articulates the most effective ways to set up your trades so you have a high probability of profit. Some of the important lessons in this book include:
- Proven set-ups, with optimal markets and non-negotiable trading rules
- Exact entry, exit, and stop loss levels for swing and intraday trading
- Seven key internals, from Skew to VIX
- Pre-market checklist for analyzing recent market behavior
- Scanning techniques for pinpointing high-probability setups
- Effective risk control techniques
- Methods for ensuring your computer runs at max speed
- Techniques for predicting market corrections
Quotes From the Book:
“Individual traders live in a state of constant flux, stuck between two worlds that combine both the best and the worth that trading has to offer”
John Carter
7.) Order Flow – Trading Setups: Trader Dale
Why You Should Read This Book
This is an important book to read for traders who are interested in learning about the impact of order flow. It can help you identify how changes in the order flow will impact the price of the stock in the short term. This book can be especially helpful for day traders that focus on analyzing price action. Order flow allows you to track large orders made by institutions and hedge funds that will move the market. Below are some of the important lessons you will get out of the book.
- Choosing the right trading platform for Order Flow trading
- Choosing the right Order Flow software
- Where to get data for Order Flow
- The best instruments to trade with Order Flow
- Order Flow – what it tells us
- How to set up Order Flow workspace
- Order Flow – trading setups
- Order Flow – confirmation setups
- How to use Order Flow to determine your Take Profit and Stop Loss
- How to use Order Flow for trade management
- How to find strong institutional Supports and Resistances using Volume Profile
- How to combine Order Flow with Volume Profile
Quotes From the Book:
“To learn what is going on in the order flow chart, you first need to under one fundamental thing: the distinction between passive and active market participants.“
Trader Dale
