Author Interview: Jack Schwager

Jack Schwager is the author of many best selling finance books. He has kindly agreed to be interviewed by Financial-Expert.co.uk, and you can read the result below.

I’ve also curated a complete list of books published by Jack over the last 20 years.

This is the second in what I hope will be a long-running series of articles with British and international investing book authors.

By encouraging more investors to pick up a few investing books to supplement what they think they know about investing, I hope to encourage better investing results.

Financial Expert Book Rankings: Unknown Market Wizards is ranked #6 in the best investing books listing on Financial-Expert.co.uk.

Follow Jack on Twitter: ‎@jackschwager

Interview with author Jack Schwager

Please could you tell us a little about your professional background and why you felt inspired to write Unknown Market Wizards

Jack: I spent over 20 years as a director of futures research at major Wall Street firms and a decade as a partner in a hedge fund advisory firm. I have also authored a dozen financial books. The most popular of these books are those in the Market Wizards series in which I interviewed many of the world’s best traders in a quest to determine the key factors underlying their extraordinary success and the lessons traders could learn from them. There have been five Market Wizards book, the first being Market Wizards published in 1989 (revised in 2012) and the most recent Unknown Market Wizards, which was just released in November 2020. The motivation in writing Unknown Market Wizards was to focus specifically on solo traders trading their own account (in contrast of hedge fund managers in large firms) who achieved remarkable trading performance over an extended period ( a decade or longer).

In the course of researching and writing this book in particular – did you come across anything that surprised you?

Jack: Yes, two things stand out. First, going into this project, I had assumed that with the tremendous growth in quantitative trading (e.g., trading firms with scores of mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, etc. and super computer processing), it was no longer possible for the individual trader to achieve the spectacular percentage returns of the traders in the first Market Wizards book.

I was amazed that there were traders in this latest book who had among the best trading records I had ever encountered. Second, I always assumed that every trader used either some form of fundamental analysis, or technical analysis, or some combination of the two. After all what else is there? In Unknown Market Wizards there is a trader who didn’t use fundamental or technical analysis. What does he use? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

For budding financial writers, what is the one piece of advice would you give to those writing to educate beginners about investments?

Jack: Make the writing entertaining. Use humor and anecdotes wherever possible. Readers learn and remember much better through stories than through a recitation of facts.

And finally, I like to ask all authors; when saving and investing your own money, what is your preferred investing style?

Jack: I use charts to pick points where I believe there is a good chance the market will begin a new price swing in an ongoing trend or witness a trend reversal. In other words, I place both trend and countertrend trades based on my interpretation of price charts. The common denominator between both types of trades is that I always determine my stop-loss exit point at the time of trade entry. The key is to make sure you don’t lose much on any single trade.

Other books written by Jack Schwager

Be sure to check out the other books published by Jack, both in the markets wizards series and his technical analysis books, and derivatives books.

Markets Wizards series:

The Market Wizards series of books each present a collection of trading tales. Featuring spectacular trades or traders, each chapter brings a fresh idea or a fresh strategy to the table. In his latest title, Unknown Market Wizards, Jack looks farther afield than the professional trading desks of London or New York, to share the stories of private individuals who have had success day trading.