What I read and what it was good for. Where a book is old enough to be public domain, the free legal copy is linked.
Edwin Lefevre · 1923
Livermore, thinly disguised. The oldest book on this list and still the one that describes how a losing streak actually feels.
Published 1923, public domain in the US.G. C. Selden · 1912
A hundred years old and it still reads like a description of my own bad days. Short, ninety pages.
Published 1912, public domain.Henry Howard Harper · 1926
Subtitled "the human element in stock market transactions". Sits right next to Selden.
Public domain.Charles Mackay · 1841
Tulip mania, the South Sea Bubble, the Mississippi scheme. Read the three financial chapters first, the rest is a bonus.
Published 1841, public domain.Thomas Gibson · 1907
Booms and busts as a repeating pattern, written before anyone called it a cycle.
Public domain.Arthur Crump · 1874
Victorian London. Useful mostly for how little the mistakes have changed.
Public domain.Mark Douglas · 2000
The five fundamental truths. Read it once a year, it lands differently every time.
Mark Douglas · 1990
The earlier, rougher version of the same argument. Heavier going, worth it.
Tom Hougaard · 2022
On trading large without flinching, and why normal behaviour loses money.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2001
The reason a good month proves nothing. Sample size, survivorship, luck.
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
Not a trading book. Explains most of my worst entries anyway.
Jack D. Schwager · 1989
Interviews. Everyone has a different method, everyone cuts losses.
John J. Murphy · 1999
The reference book. Not read front to back, looked things up in.
Steve Nison · 1991
Where the candle names come from, and what they meant before they were memes.
Alexander Elder · 1993
Mind, method, money. The money-management third is the part that matters.
James Clear · 2018
Journaling every trade is a habit problem before it is a trading problem.
Morgan Housel · 2020
About wealth rather than trading. Good counterweight when the screen gets loud.
Only books whose copyright has expired are linked, and only to Project Gutenberg and LibriVox - both of which publish public domain work legally and for free. Everything still in copyright is listed without a link on purpose. If you want one of those, buy it.