One Good Trade

Mike Bellafiore co-founded SMB Capital, a proprietary trading firm in New York, and here he describes from the inside how he trains his traders. Published in 2010, the book follows specific cases from the firm's desk: who progressed, who fell by the wayside, and why.

The account is direct, with real names and real situations from the desk: traders who arrived with impressive résumés and didn't survive their first year, and others with an unassuming profile who ended up being the most consistent. Bellafiore doesn't sugarcoat the process: he describes the failures too, not just the cases that worked out.

The core of the book isn't a specific strategy but the evaluation process itself: what a prop firm looks at to decide whether to keep backing a trader or cut their capital, and what separates those who survive the first year from those who never get a second shot. Bellafiore's conclusion is that raw talent matters less than the ability to learn from every single trade.

If you're at a futures prop firm or considering joining one, this book gives you a fairly accurate sense of the logic used to evaluate a trader in training, even though the original setting is stock day trading on a New York desk rather than the remote evaluation model futures firms use today. Read it for the process, not for the specific setups it describes.