In the 1970s there were very few books on technical analysis. Now there a many great books available in the field of technical analysis and finance. However, I’m going to keep these lists short and focused. These lists contains many other wonderful books on technical analysis, finance, and behavioral analysis, but if I had to pick a library of only four books, this is it – Getting Started List.
Getting Started List
Kirkpatrick, Charles D. and Dahlquist, Julie R., 2016, Technical Analysis, Pearson Education, Upper Saddle River, NJ. 3rd Edition. If I were picking a single book; this would be it.
Easterling, Ed., 2011, Probable Outcomes, Cypress House, Fort Bragg, CA. Ed also wrote an earlier book called Unexpected Returns which is also quite good.
Bernstein, Peter L., 1998, Against the Gods, John Wiley and Sons, New York, NY. A fabulous book about risk.
Montier, James, 2010, The Little Book of Behavioural Investing, John Wiley and Sons, West Sussex, England.
Additional Recommended Reading
I’m not sure why I started this list because there are so many great book on investing out there now that it is difficult to decide which to read. I guess I just answered my own dilemma as I have read many, if not most of them and these are the one I personally would recommend because they are educational.
Pring, Martin J., 1985, Technical Analysis Explained, McGraw-Hill. Martin has written many books on Technical Analysis. My latest edition is the 4th and came out in 2002. He also has a workbook for it.
Bernstein, Peter L., 1992, Capital Ideas, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ. This is the same author from the short list who wrote Against the Gods. He is an exceptional writer. He also wrote The Power of Gold.
Makridakis, Spyros and Hogarth, Robin. 2010. Dance with Chance, Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England. Makridakis wrote a lot of books on management forecasting methods.
Mandelbrot, Benoit, 2004, The (Mis) Behavior of Markets, Basic Books, New York, NY. Mandelbrot tried to get modern finance to adapt Paretian distributions as they better represented market data. He gave up when they said it was too complex.
Shefrin, Hersh, 2002, Beyond Fear and Greed, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Solow, Kenneth R., 2009, Buy and Hold is Dead Again, Morgan James Publishing, Garden City, New York.
Tetlock, Phlip E, 2005, Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. I read that this is out in an new and updated edition.
Fox, Justin, 2009, Myth of the Rational Market, HarperCollins, New York, NY.
Coleman, Thomas S., 2012, Quantitative Risk Management, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ. This is kind of a nerd book, but vast coverage.
Weatherall, James Ol, 2013, The Physics of Wall Street, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, New York, NY.
Another great source of technical papers is the Social Science Research Network at SSRN.com. These are mainly academic papers but many are not. Turn off the computer and the internet and get a real education from books. Sorry, I’m just old fashioned.
Dance with the Trend,
Greg Morris
