Unknown Market Wizards

In this third instalment, Schwager sets aside institutional managers and interviews only anonymous retail traders. All of them trade their own money from home, and among them is one who turned $2,500 into $50 million and another with an average annual return of 337% over 13 straight years, neither known outside their own circle before this book.

The shift in focus from the first two volumes is deliberate: there is no hedge fund résumé or institutional capital behind these traders, just a personal account and a method each of them built on their own through trial and error. The interviews follow the same format as Market Wizards and The New Market Wizards, also in this catalogue, but the profile of the interviewee is entirely different.

What these anonymous traders share with the managers in the earlier books is, again, discipline and a personal system, not access to resources. None of them reached these results through inside information or a team of analysts; they got there by repeating a specific process for years without skipping it.

It is the volume in the series closest to the situation of a trader operating alone, without a team or structure behind them, which is why it tends to be the most cited by anyone starting out on their own account. You can read it as a standalone or as the closing chapter of the trilogy, after Market Wizards and The New Market Wizards.