Jack D. Schwager: Market Wizards Interviews with Top Traders
Trading Books - 08 April 2006

How do some of the world's most successful traders amass millions of dollars in a year—or sometimes in hours? Are they masters of a priceless wizardry or simply the very lucky winners in a random market lottery that allows only a few players to become fantastically wealthy? What are the secrets of their unheard-of successes?

After interviewing top traders in a variety of markets, market expert Jack D. Schwager concludes that while method undoubtedly accounts largely for trading success, no one approach is used by all, or even most, of the traders interviewed. Some are technicians, monitoring price action. Others are fundamentalists, trying to forecast future price levels based on what they know of a market, an industry, or a company. Some act largely on personal initiative and intuition, while still others rely completely on automated systems.

Even more interesting is Schwager's finding that, as great a role as method plays, it must be accompanied by the "proper" mental posture—a notion that surfaces frequently in the interviews. The secret seems to have more to do with personal attitude than with approach. What mental disciplines, what emotional responses, what intangible personal ingredients make these top traders so mysteriously effective? What enables them to work financial magic while so many others walk away losers?

MARKET WIZARDS allows the reader to delve into the minds of these professional traders. It explains the very elements of their success…different approaches used in different markets…trading rules that each of them adhere to…personal advice for other traders.

Understand what it takes to become a successful trader. Hear it in the very words of the MARKET WIZARDS.

Jack Schwager is an executive director and senior portfolio manager at Fortune Group, an international hedge fund advisory firm. He is the principal investment manager of Fortune's Market Wizards Funds. His prior experience includes over 30 years on Wall Street, including 22 years as director of futures research for some of Wall Street's leading firms, and ten years as the co-principal of a commodity trading advisory business. Mr Schwager began his career with Reynolds Securities as a research analyst (1971 to 1973), and then moved to Loeb Rhoades Hornblower where he became director of futures research (1973 to 1979). From 1979 to 1983 he was director of futures research at Smith Barney, and from 1983 to 1984 he was director of research (for one trading group) at Commodities Corporation. He was director of futures research at Paine Webber from 1984 to 1988, and director of futures research at Prudential Securities from 1988 to 1996. Between 1996 and 1999 he continued to work for Prudential as a consultant.

Mr Schwager has written extensively on the futures industry and great traders (in all financial markets). His first book, A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets, published in 1984 and is considered to be one of the classic reference works in the field. More than a decade later he revised and expanded this original work into the three-volume series, Schwager on Futures, consisting of Fundamental Analysis (1995), Technical Analysis (1996), and Managed Trading: Myths and Truths (1996). He is also the author of Getting Started in Technical Analysis (1999), which is part of John Wiley's popular “Getting Started” series. Mr Schwager is perhaps best known for his best-selling series of interviews with the greatest hedge fund managers of the last two decades, which includes Market Wizards (1989 and 2006), The New Market Wizards (1992), and Stock Market Wizards (2001). Mr Schwager is a frequent seminar speaker and has lectured on a range of analytical topics with particular focus on the characteristics of great traders, fallacies of hedge fund investing, technical analysis, and trading system evaluation. He holds a BA in Economics from Brooklyn College (1970) and an MA in Economics from Brown University (1971).