Why this book
Jack Schwager did something the trading world hadn't seen before: instead of theorizing about what separates a great trader from an average one, he picked up the phone and called the traders who had actually done it — people who had turned modest starting capital into fortunes worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars — and simply asked them how. The result is a set of seventeen long-form conversations, conducted in the late 1980s just after the 1987 crash, with traders spanning futures, currencies, equities, and global macro. Some names, like Paul Tudor Jones, were already becoming legendary when the book appeared; others, like Ed Seykota and Michael Marcus, remained far less known outside trading circles despite performance records that rank among the most extraordinary the profession has produced.
Schwager deliberately refuses to impose a single unifying theory on what he found, and that refusal is the book's real design choice. Some interviewees are pure technical analysts who never look at a company's fundamentals; others are fundamentally driven and dismiss chart-reading outright. Some hold positions for weeks, others are in and out within hours. He lets these contradictions stand rather than smoothing them into a false consensus, forcing the reader to do the work of noticing what actually recurs across seventeen wildly different approaches — and what recurs, again and again, is not a specific technique but a shared relationship to risk: obsessive capital preservation, a clear, predetermined exit point defined before entering any position, indifference to being right on any single trade, and, in nearly every interview, a story of an earlier catastrophic loss the trader now describes as the most important education of their career.
Who should read it
Anyone trading markets seriously, or studying the psychology of high-stakes decision-making under real uncertainty, will find this the closest thing the profession has to a shared curriculum, decades after publication. Readers hoping for a specific system to copy will be frustrated — the book is explicitly not a how-to manual, and several interviewees' exact tactics have since been arbitraged away by markets that evolved past them; what endures are the underlying disciplines, not the mechanics.
About the author
Jack D. Schwager is an American trader, fund manager, and author who built his career over more than two decades as director of futures research at several major Wall Street firms before turning to writing; he holds degrees in economics from Brooklyn College and Brown University, and Market Wizards was the first entry in a series of trader-interview books he has continued for decades, including The New Market Wizards, Stock Market Wizards, and Hedge Fund Market Wizards.