Top Books for Stock Traders

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If you want to hone your stock trading skills, you may want to read the advice of some of the experts. Here is a list of some of the top books relating to trading stocks and options. Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list, as Amazon lists over 10,000 books relating to stock trading. At least, these will give you a start.

Trade Like Warren Buffett
by James Altucher
Most people don’t realize that not only is Warren Buffett an investor, but he is also a trader, and a successful one at that.

High-Probability Trade Setups: A Chartists Guide to Real-Time Trading
by Timothy Knight
How to use technical approaches to find the best stock trade setups.

Think & Trade Like a Champion: The Secrets, Rules & Blunt Truths of a Stock Market Wizard
by Mark Minervini
The book covers personal trading rules and the secret techniques that made the author one of America’s most successful stock traders.

Stock Trader’s Almanac 2020 (Almanac Investor Series)
by Jeffrey A. Hirsch
Every stock trader should have this resource. It will be available on November 19.

Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude
by Mark Douglas
Learn the reasons for lack of consistency and how to overcome the ingrained mental habits that cost money.

Wall Street News Network Day Trading Journal: Notebook Diary Log for your Stock, ETF, and Option Trades
by Wall Street News Network
A journal with over 100 pages of specially designed fill-in-the-blank pages to track all your stock, ETF, and option trades, whether they are long or short trades. Fields include: Date, Symbol, Company, Transaction Recommended By, Why decision was made to do this transaction, Buy or Short, # of Shares, Price/share, Commission, Subtotal of opening transactions, Total opening transaction, and much more.

Wall Street News Network Stock Trading Journal: Notebook Diary Log for tracking your stocks, options, and ETFs tradesby Wall Street News Network
A logbook for tracking your stock trades and investments, priced at less than $7.

Option Volatility and Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques, 2nd Edition
by Sheldon Natenberg
An extensive guide to trading stock options.

Swing Trading with Options: How to Trade Big Trends for Big Profits
by Ivaylo Ivanov
Using stock momentum to generate profits on options over a three to six month time period.

Penny Stock Trading Journal: Notebook Diary Tracker of Your Penny Stock Transactions
by Borsa Valori
A five star rated book designed for you to keep track of your penny stock trades and transactions.

20 Year Old Turns $20 into $20 Million Trading Stocks in 20 Days

Stock trading millionaire student after
a long day of trading

A San Diego, California based 20 year old student named William Mendax had saved up $20 from his part time student job working in the cafeteria at San Diego State University, and decided to put his money to work. He is a business major and has been doing a lot of studying of the stock market, so he decided to try his hand at trading.

After only twenty business days, he turned his $20 initial investment into an amazing $20,000,000, all from just trading stocks. He has decided to quit college and retire.

He did it by first investing in 2000 shares of a stock with the symbol FICT at a penny a share, which later jumped to $1.25 per share, generating proceeds of $2,500.

He took that money and bought 10,000 share of YWVU at 25 cents per share. When he sold out at 4.50 per share, he garnered $45,000.

With those proceeds, he invested in 30,000 shares of ABAD for $1.50, and was able to sell out at $3.30 per share which gave him slightly less than $100,000.

He took the $99,000 proceeds and bought his first higher priced shares. He paid $12 per share for 8,250 shares of VANUS. The stock rose to $18.50 per share, giving him $152,625.

At that time, he decided to go back to trading the lower priced stocks, so he used his proceeds to buy 1,526,250 shares of PERX at 10 cents per share. Fortunately for him, the stock rose to 90 cents per share. This now provided him with working capital of $1,373,625.

Finally, he bought 45,787,500 shares of IAPR at three cents per share, which shortly spiked to 44 cents per share, ending up with $20,146,500. Not to shabby for four weeks work.

Disclosure: Author didn't own any of the above stocks at the time the article was written. Please note the date of this article.

The Penny Stocks on the New York Stock Exchange

The Securities and Exchange Commission defines penny stocks as stocks that trade for less than $5 per share. It may seem hard to believe but there are a large number of stocks on the NYSE that trade at that level. As a matter of fact, there are almost two dozen that trade for less than $2 a share, and several of them are even generating earnings.

Here is the list of New York Stock Exchange stocks trading for less than $2 a share. The following shows the name of the company, the stock symbol, the current price, and the P/E ratio, if applicable.

Acorn International, Inc.	ATV	1.54
Bluelinx Holdings Inc.	BXC	1.37
IFM Investments Limited	CTC	1.22
Dover Downs Gaming & Entertainment Inc.	DDE	1.44
Cal Dive International Inc	DVR	1.56
Equus Total Return, Inc.	EQS	1.99	66
Forest Oil Corp.	FST	1.95	3
Genco Shipping & Trading Ltd.	GNK	1.70
Agria Corporation	GRO	1.45
General Steel Holdings, Inc.	GSI	1.14
Hyperdynamics Corporation	HDY	1.60
Homex Development Corp.	HXM	1.47
Mechel OAO	MTL	1.89
Maxcom Telecomunicaciones S.A.B. de C.V.	MXT	1.73
Oi SA	OIBR	1.22	3
Oxford Resource Partners, L.P.	OXF	1.32
Quantum Corporation	QTM	1.14
Rio Alto Mining Limited	RIOM	1.99	12
RadioShack Corp.	RSH	1.34
STR Holdings, Inc.	STRI	1.50
Box Ships Inc.	TEU	1.75	5
China Xiniya Fashion Limited	XNY	1.08	4
Zuoan Fashion Limited	ZA	1.70	1

If you like interesting lists like this, you should check out the other stock lists at WallStreetNewsNetwork.com.

Top Selling Stock Market Books

Are you looking for some springtime reading? Or maybe you're just looking for a great gift. Have you considered one of the new (or old) top selling books on investing in the stock market?

Here are the current top selling books at Amazon (AMZN) in the category of Investing - Stocks. Interestingly, two of the books are about penny stocks.

Global Value: How to Spot Bubbles, Avoid Market Crashes, and Earn Big Returns in the Stock Market by Mebane Faber

The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing: Fifth Edition by Jason Kelly

One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market by Peter Lynch

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Penny Stocks For Beginners: How to Get Rich Investing In Penny Stocks (Penny Stock Investing, Penny Stock Trading) by Devon Wilcox

Penny Stocks For Dummies by Peter Leeds


Also, don't forget about the 30 day free trial of Amazon Prime which allows you to instantly watch over 40,000 movies and TV episodes, plus get FREE shipping, no matter how small your order.

Is It Really Possible to Make Money Trading Penny Stocks?

You may have read or heard about stock traders who have made huge amounts of money from trading penny stocks. You may also know people who lost lots of money in penny stocks; maybe they were your friends, relatives, or even you. Making money in penny stocks may not be easy, but it is certainly possible.

What is a Penny Stock?

First, let's look at what a penny stock, also commonly referred to as a microcap stock, is. The Securities and Exchange Commission definesa penny stock as follows:

'The term "penny stock" generally refers to a security issued by a very small company that trades at less than $5 per share. Penny stocks generally are quoted over-the-counter, such as on the OTC Bulletin Board (which is a facility of FINRA) or OTC Link LLC (which is owned by OTC Markets Group, Inc., formerly known as Pink OTC Markets Inc.); penny stocks may, however, also trade on securities exchanges, including foreign securities exchanges.'

What is a Pump and Dump?

Many penny stock investors have been the victims of 'pump and dump' schemes. A pump-and-dump usually involves an individual or company buying up large amounts of shares of a low priced stock, them promoting the stock like crazy through glossy brochures, social media, and spam emails with misleading information to drive the price of the stock up.  Of course, when the price goes up, the pumper dumps the stock on unsuspecting investors, and the stock crashes.

The Key to Making Money with Penny Stocks

So how do the expert daytraders make money with these stocks? First, they take advantage of the fact that pumped up stocks can be shorted. Shorting a stock, in very simple terms, means you make money when the stock drops. If you can determine when the stock has peaked, you profit as the stock tanks.

Another way you can profit is by jumping on the bandwagon as soon as the pump starts, and getting out before it peaks. The key is determining where the entry and exit points are.

Who is Making Money Trading Stocks

Do people really make money trading stocks this way? Here is a great example. Timothy Sykes, the CEO of Millionaire Media and Profit.ly, turned less than $12,500 into over $1.6 million in three years by trading stocks while still at college. He then founded his hedge fund, the Cilantro Fund, in 2003, which was ranked by Barclays as the #1 Short Bias Fund for 2003-2006.

Subsequently Sykes became an educator, showing others how to trade stocks. A couple years ago, he created the Millionaire Challenge which has a goal of making millionaires out of average investors. He has now done that twice, with his second student just breaking through the million dollar level after starting with $1,500 two and a half years ago. 

Sykes's Profit.ly website provides trade alerts, watch lists, and video lessons. It also has the trades and performance of traders posted on the site.

Assuming you have the patience and drive to learn, the possibility of making significant profits trading penny stocks is within your realm. Just don't get caught on the wrong sides of the pumps and dumps.
  

The Latest Penny Stock Promotion: This One is Scary!!!

Every day, I receive dozens of spam emails in some of my varied email accounts. They are usually promoting some stock that trades anywhere from a penny to a dollar, and sometimes even less than a penny!

They all seem to have the same style, and similar headline like "This one is on the move" or "This stock will make you rich." Most (if not all) of these seem to be pump-and-dump schemes.
However, I just received a new one today, that kind of scares me. Check it out. The subject line in the email is:

My new pick could literally DOUBLE YOUR MONEY OR MORE!  
OK, now read the content of the message:

Apple (Nasdaq:A-A-P-L) has shown its latter-day iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, which have not affected the investors. Nevertheless, we got to hear about a secret newly-designed product, which is developed in Cupertino (the Headquarter of Apple). Everyone will have interest in this newcomer (throughout a year, it will be put in use by all the people). Today, it's high time to get hold of the Apple's stocks. These securities will go up in price very soon.

Has Apple (AAPL) fallen to the level (figuratively) of a penny stock and a pump-and-dump?

Disclosure: Author owns AAPL.

The Stock Market Book That Gave Me Nightmares for 8 Weeks

Several years ago, I read the non-fiction autobiography called The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort. At the time, I was doing a lot of reviews of a lot of books, but I held off on this one because the book gave me nightmares for eight weeks (especially one of the hospital scenes). I didn't want anyone else to get nightmares at the time. But now that the book is going to be made into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, I think it's OK to tell others about this book and let them have eight weeks of nightmares, if they choose to read it. Be forewarned! (BTW, I actually enjoyed the book in spite of my nightmares. More about that shortly.)

This is probably the most disturbing book I've ever read, not just of investment books but of all books. So what could be so disturbing about a guy who was involved with investments and the stock market? The book is about a guy who started up a pump-and-dump stock brokerage firm, whereby he would buy up a bunch of low priced and penny stocks and have the brokers foist the stocks on the unsuspecting public at much higher prices. He ended up making multi-millions of dollars and became very wealthy. Sound boring? Let me give you a Twitter style version of what it's really about (without doing too many spoilers):

huge amounts of cocaine

four prostitutes with one guy

excessive adultery, of course

taping large wads of cash to a girl's body so it can get through customs to be laundered

throwing little people through the office

walking through the halls of a hospital with a hypodermic hanging out of buttocks (this was not the hospital scene that gave me nightmares)

pushing a guy out a window from a very high building

extreme sex

the yacht that almost sank

expensive cars and private jets

enormous amounts of money

extremely powerful Quaaludes

helicopter crashes

So the above is a list of the reasons why you might want to read it.

I did like reading the book for a couple reasons. First, it gave an extremely close-up view of the inside world of the pump-and-dump brokerage industry and the people involved in it. Second, many parts of the book were very humorous.

The one drawback I found about the book was the in the first chapter, Belfort starts out being "lower than pond scum." In the next chapter, he is wealthy and successful with his own helicopter and pilot. I would like to have seen more on how he made it from the bottom to the top. Maybe he is saving that for another book.

Anyway, if you are offended by lots of dirty words, then don't read The Wolf of Wall Street. If you are offended by any of the items on the list above, don't read The Wolf of Wall Street. Otherwise, if you want an eye-opener on the seamy seedy side of Wall Street, then read The Wolf of Wall Street.