Description:
If you're thinking about day trading for a living, take a cold shower and then read The Day Traders. If you read the book first, you may not need the shower. If you do both and still want to day trade, you may well have what it takes to succeed, and this book will certainly help. Gregory J. Millman, a financial journalist and author of The Vandal's Crown, tells a behind-the-scenes story of how technology and scandal brought bucket shops to cyberspace, how ordinary folks, exploiting the disintegration of the old order, are becoming gunslingers in an extreme financial video game offering danger to all who try it and limitless rewards to those few who succeed. Day traders must have intense focus and discipline, keen minds, fast reflexes--oh, and plenty of capital. Their prosperity depends on entering up to 300 trades a day, successfully pitting themselves against the best professional traders at the biggest Wall Street houses. And it's not getting any easier, for as day trading has made markets more efficient--narrowing spreads and increasing liquidity--more efficient markets make successful day trading even more difficult as the spreads narrow. Millman interviews the patriarchs and prophets of modern day trading, along with technologists, regulators, lawyers, market makers and of course--lots of day traders. A psychologist who treats many day traders says the game is pathologically addictive with sometimes fatal consequences. There's a chapter devoted to the bucket-shop wizard of the Gilded Age, the first day trading master, Jesse Livermore, whose penetrating insights are gospel for many traders (and immortalized in Edwin Lefèvre's Reminiscences of a Stock Operator). Both Livermore and a recent Atlanta day trader blew their brains out in the end, the latter taking several other day traders with him. But those who aspire to the calling will find much useful information and advice here, including a checklist to consider before starting, and an overview of a month-long "boot-camp" course on markets, trading technology, and extreme investing. Everyone else will find a vastly entertaining and informative read about an important but somewhat bizarre aspect of our market system and how it works. --Scott Harrison
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