The best books for trading stocks part-time

Darvas’s book How I Made 2 Million In The Stock Market wasn’t the first book I read, but it was the one that gave me the biggest confidence boost when I was trading part-time. 

Darvas was a professional ballroom dancer who taught himself how to trade part-time back in the 1950s. Back then there was no internet, he drew his charts by hand, and transaction fees were over $100 in today’s money. 

He saw not being glued to the market all day as his advantage and he leveraged it. He even threatened his broker not to call him in the middle of the day. He did all of his work at night and on weekends. 

This book reads like a novel. If you’re looking for inspiration, and a basic philosophy that can still work today, this is it!

William O’Neil’s How To Make Money In Stocks is great for anyone looking to learn how to trade stocks part-time.

It gives you a framework of what actually causes stocks to make the big moves of 300%, 500%, 1,000% or more over the span of a few months to a few years along with a historical perspective of why they move the way they move and a strategy of how to take advantage of it that doesn’t require tuning into the news or being glued to a PC all day.

One of the big things you’ll learn in O’Neil’s book is that modeling success is key. The book starts out with over 100 pages of annotated charts of the biggest winning stocks in history. What you’ll quickly notice is that history repeats itself, over and over again.

Van Tharp’s Super Trader is the book that changed my perspective on trading.

After reading it I began thinking of trading like a business (O’Neil touches on this as well) that works best with well-designed systems and processes.

Tharp goes deep into psychology and belief systems. He says “We don’t actually trade the market. We trade our beliefs about the market.” If this is the case, we better gain as much awareness of our beliefs as we can! He was a huge inspiration in this department and was one of my biggest inspirations in the realm of trading psychology.

Tharp also introduces position sizing concepts in this book that reveal “how much we bet” has far more to do with our overall success in trading than most anything else. Even more so than where we enter and exit. 

Mark Minervini’s Think and Trade Like A Champion solidifies the lessons in Darvas, O’Neil, and Tharp and takes it to a whole other level! Mark is one of the big reasons why I was finally able to put everything together, find my own success, and do it all while still working the 9-5. This book changed my life.

In Think and Trade Like a Champion you’ll learn the finer details and nuances of chart patterns (what to look for and how to trade them) and what to avoid, the sizing and risk management strategies that helped Mark win multiple US Investing Championships including how to manage the reward to risk relationship, mindset, plus a whole lot more.

Mark has written several books and I recommend studying each of them. Think and Trade Like A Champion is my personal favorite.

Mark also wrote the Foreword to my book.

One of the best ways to understand the psychology of trading is through storytelling, seeing it through someone else’s eyes.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator tells the story of Jesse Livermore who is considered one of the best traders to have ever lived. 

This book helped me understand the emotional gravity of what I was getting myself into. The book shares Jesse’s journey from starting in bucket shops to cornering the cotton market, to going broke and coming back and going broke again! 

If you’re going to get involved in trading, you need an understanding of not just the strategies but the emotions involved in trading. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator grabs you, sucks you in, and gets you feeling some of the emotional highs and lows that Jesse went through, and what to avoid.