Market Wizards
Jack D. Schwager · 1989
Market Wizards (1989) is a book by Jack D. Schwager on money & investing. Jack Schwager interviews America's greatest traders. Marcus, Kovner, Dennis, Paul Tudor Jones, Seykota, Hite, to learn what makes them win. The answer is not magic timing but discipline, risk control, and self-knowledge.
Schwager interviews a dozen traders who turned thousands into hundreds of millions and finds their edge was never a secret indicator, it was ruthless loss control and knowing themselves, which is the one lesson that survives the leap from trading floor to any risky pursuit.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Market Wizards pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Every wizard is obsessed with the downside, not the upside. Michael Marcus never risked more than **5%** of equity on a trade, Larry Hite capped it at **1%**, and Paul Tudor Jones demanded a **5:1 reward-to-risk** ratio, they win by making sure their losses stay small enough to be survivable.
- Ed Seykota's dictum that **'everybody gets what they want out of the market'** reframes losing as a psychological choice: traders who blow up often have a subconscious need to lose, so mastering your own motives matters more than mastering the charts.
The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 9 chapters
The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.
- The Search for a Common Thread
- Michael Marcus: Learning to Survive
- Bruce Kovner: The Disciplined Macro Mind
- Richard Dennis: Can Trading Be Taught?
- Paul Tudor Jones: Defense Wins
- Ed Seykota: Everybody Gets What They Want
- Larry Hite: The Mathematics of Risk
- The Stock Wizards: O'Neil, Schwartz, and Steinhardt
- The Psychology of Winning
Finish Market Wizards tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 12 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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