Full Title: One Good Trade: Inside the Highly Competitive World of Proprietary Trading

Author: Mike Bellafior (Twitter @MikeBellafiore)

Publisher/Date: Wiley (2010)

List Cost/Pages:  $60 Hardcover / 368 pages

Cover Notes:
Proprietary trading firms do somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of all the equity volume in the U.S. markets on any given day. But unlike most firms on the Street, proprietary firms have no clients. They do not take other people’s money and speculate it on their behalf. Proprietary trading (or ‘prop trading’ for short) is done for the benefit of the company’s partners and employees only: the firm is the client. Their profits are generated solely from the bets they make on their traders. If they are wrong, they lose their own money. When they are right, they keep a percentage of their winnings. The world of prop trading is mentally and emotionally exhausting, but the rewards can be substantial, if you understand how to identify good trades, take profits at the right time, and limit losses.

In One Good Trade, Mike Bellafiore reveals the inner workings of the proprietary trading firm he cofounded, detailing the challenges of prop trading and explaining why traders succeed or fail. In the process, he shows how you can use the skills and strategies developed at his firm to improve your own trading success.

The author takes you inside the world of prop trading to show how the professionals trade successfully, sharing all the important market lessons he has learned over the course of his career while introducing a fascinating cast of characters, some of whom have succeeded, and too many who have failed. He offers a range of straightforward trading strategies, such as breakouts from congestion, trading off support and resistance, and identifying consolidation setups. Perhaps more importantly, he explains the importance of other, often overlooked skills critical to successful trading: developing consistency in monitoring markets and uncovering trading opportunities, discipline in executing trades, making rational risk/reward bets, and managing trading capital. He reveals those skills through illustrative stories of the growth of his trading firm and the ups and downs of traders he has trained.

Becoming a better trader requires discipline, a thick playbook of trading setups , and well-rounded trading skills, and One Good Trade will show you how to develop all three.