What do you think?
Rate this book
Zen in the Markets: Confessions of a Samurai Trader
Let the market make the decisions, not your ego. Gives you the rules of successful trading with Zen. This book is full of life-changing ideas which will determine how well you play the inner game. The underlying message is that you are in a contest with yourself and not the market. Presents a Zen approach that reveals how to listen, recognize, and obey the language that the market speaks. Your ego may be very reluctant to be subdued.
- GenresPsychologyFinance
97 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
6 people are currently reading
157 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 10, 2024
Mostly about keeping your ego in check and meditating
October 9, 2021
This is a short book about some of the "Samurai Trader's Maxims" a.k.a. axioms of profitable trading. The author compiled a list of core rules to know in order to become a successful market speculator, the book can be useful for both long term investors and short term traders. The author also adopts a no BS approach by giving many reasonable and sound statements about trading. However, most of the ideas in the book are by no mean secrets, many of the information are simply recycled from other trading books of similar nature e.g. Mark Douglas books. This one is just much more concise. Below are some of the statements and/or analogies that I find interesting..
"What’s difficult is ridding ourselves of our ego. It takes a lot of training, years and years of it for some of us. It’s like school. When you pay attention to what the teacher says, you get good grades. In this case the market is our teacher, and it pays to listen."
"The pain to our ego is in proportion to the size of trades. Avoidance of pain is what keeps us from acting fast. Losing that fear is the key to success. We must trust the process."
"It’s easier to swallow our medicine when the pills are small than when they are big."
"It is better to get on the train as it is leaving the station than to get in front of it as the train appears to be coming to the end of the line."
"Top picking is the flip side of bottom fishing. We are fighting the river. We may win once in a while, and that’s bad because it bloats our ego and gives it a false sense of omniscience. The river always wins. Paddle with the stream."
"Some people are smart enough to know they don’t have it and stay away from the market. Others play the market and find out the hard way what’s required. If they have the fortitude and willingness to learn from their mistakes, they might make it. Luck can carry you only so far. Eventually the market weeds out those who rely on luck to survive."
"The ego is like a little child. It wants instant gratification. Taking profits early gives that quick reward."
"To be a superior trader is to be a warrior. A warrior never lets up on his discipline. He is prepared for the next encounter. A famous Samurai battle cry was “After victory, tighten your helmet cords.” It is very appropriate for anyone involved in the markets. You may have won this battle. Be prepared for the next and the next and the next. The battle with your ego is never ending. Never forget that."
"Like any other professional game player, you have to prepare yourself for your sport. In the trading game preparation is mostly mental."
Overall, it is a great book to carry around when trading-on-the-go like travelling. Just to remind yourself some of the hard rules in order to stay grounded. A solid 3.5/5 book. (rounding down)
"What’s difficult is ridding ourselves of our ego. It takes a lot of training, years and years of it for some of us. It’s like school. When you pay attention to what the teacher says, you get good grades. In this case the market is our teacher, and it pays to listen."
"The pain to our ego is in proportion to the size of trades. Avoidance of pain is what keeps us from acting fast. Losing that fear is the key to success. We must trust the process."
"It’s easier to swallow our medicine when the pills are small than when they are big."
"It is better to get on the train as it is leaving the station than to get in front of it as the train appears to be coming to the end of the line."
"Top picking is the flip side of bottom fishing. We are fighting the river. We may win once in a while, and that’s bad because it bloats our ego and gives it a false sense of omniscience. The river always wins. Paddle with the stream."
"Some people are smart enough to know they don’t have it and stay away from the market. Others play the market and find out the hard way what’s required. If they have the fortitude and willingness to learn from their mistakes, they might make it. Luck can carry you only so far. Eventually the market weeds out those who rely on luck to survive."
"The ego is like a little child. It wants instant gratification. Taking profits early gives that quick reward."
"To be a superior trader is to be a warrior. A warrior never lets up on his discipline. He is prepared for the next encounter. A famous Samurai battle cry was “After victory, tighten your helmet cords.” It is very appropriate for anyone involved in the markets. You may have won this battle. Be prepared for the next and the next and the next. The battle with your ego is never ending. Never forget that."
"Like any other professional game player, you have to prepare yourself for your sport. In the trading game preparation is mostly mental."
Overall, it is a great book to carry around when trading-on-the-go like travelling. Just to remind yourself some of the hard rules in order to stay grounded. A solid 3.5/5 book. (rounding down)
June 6, 2024
Bleeeeech
I've stopped reading trading books that are 'strategic' or promise secrets or setups, but I saw a copy of this and picked it up because it was nice and short and I thought it might do well with being a kind of Eastern (written by a Westerner though) take on the Transcendental Phenomenology ideas towards the markets that I've been playing with.
And the first part of the book is just different words for what I've been thinking about. He uses zen, I've been using epoche. Tom a toe, tom ah toe.
Then he starts giving advice.
One he claims that history doesn't repeat and thinking that it does will result in disastrous results. He kind of has a point, but every (EVERY!) bull market will at some point claim to be unlike every other one and won't end (when people are starting to say this, start taking a look around for the exits because shits going to get ugly real soon (similarly if people who would never own something like Crypto are now experts in it you can be assured it's about to fucking crash hard)). But while I'm pointing out that history does repeat, his examples are the Bearish pundits of the mid-80's saying that it can't go higher, and the people who kept trying to pick tops and got their asses handed to them when new highs kept being met (you know until that day in October in 1987). He points to the fact that after Black Monday people Great Depression Part 2, but were met with a market that quickly shrugged the day off and would go on making new highs, and he points to the fact that Japan's Bear Market at the time was slogging on and talking heads were expecting the same to happen in the rest of the world.
This isn't a good reason to ignore history though, but because he is ignoring it I'm assuming that his ahistorical take doesn't take into account that in the Great Depression and say the brutal Bear Market of the early 70's shorting wasn't a common strategy. In the 60's for example shorting was considered Anti-American, and it wasn't until the late 60's things like Hedge Funds, that weren't long only funds became a thing and would grow in popularity. So why is this important? Well if there isn't large scale shorting going on and everyone is selling then capital / value / money is just disappearing, but when prices are falling and people are profiting off of the fall the capital is changing hands and gets redeployed into the market, as opposed to leaving a wasteland in the wake (yeah it sucks that people lose lots of money, and things like retirement funds blow up and all of that, but the fact that it doesn't take a decade or more to recover is the better than no one profiting and shit being really bad for a really long time (yes I'm the person who wrote how much he hates capitalism in my review of JR!)). So there is that, which is something which people on financial TV and in the media don't seem to understand since they will use terms like Wealth Evaporating, when it's just changing hands. For another example look how quickly the market rebounded after mid February and March 2020. And no it wasn't because of fucking stimulus checks.
Anyway to keep on this point. He points to the differences between the Japanese recovery and the rest of the world as an example of history doesn't repeat. But, the customs of Japan also made it that recovery would be slow. The market was grossly over priced when it crashed because of a lack of liquidity. It was considered disrespectful for a company to sell stocks of another company, so companies would have massive amounts of stocks of other companies and were honor bound to hold on to them. This leads to it also being disrespectful for major players to short the market, and when buyers disappeared all the market could do was go down and capital evaporated. This makes a very difficult situation to rebuild from (this is a very simplistic look, and really I only know bits and pieces of this, but the point is it's not ahistorical and outside of an understanding of history and culture).
Next, and this might be more a thing of the times he wrote the book in (early 90's) and being right before the advent of massive amounts of electronic trading, he claims multiple times charts are useless and will only lose you money. At the time he was a pit trader (I think, it's a little unclear), so there is something different about that, but I don't know how someone reading this book who claims this book has improved their trading does with just maybe having a raw feed of tick data. It's bad advice to give up on charts unless maybe you are one of the last remaining pit traders and can 'feel' the digital currents around you.
Last, and certainly not least he offers a way to succeed in the market. He says it's simple you buy when the price is going up and sell when it's going down. He says price goes up twice and it's a trend. What does that mean, two ticks up? Two bars or periods up? What constitutes going up, especially if you remove all history to relate it to? He admits that this will get you chopped up, but being chopped up is better than being massacred. Even though you can blow up and account being chopped up with lots of small losses, especially when you add in the spread and commissions.
And he says to hold on to winners and cut losers, but how does one hold onto a winner when any movement down twice would be considered the market moving down? There is an irrationality, which one might say (if one has read the book) is me being ego driven or an Aristotelean for pointing out (which I may be the first, but not the second, I'm quite firmly post-modern in my take of the markets and believe that syllogistic / rational thinking is counter-productive to understanding), to the book and the message he presents. And my guess is that if he is a successful trader it's not because he's following the advice he is giving but is using this unconscious knowledge of years of trading to have a 'feel' for the market. And he isn't buying just because the price is going up and selling just because price is going down.
If there were a genre of hippy trading manuals this would be in it. If you are looking for a book that incorporates the good ideas of this book, but without the weird history and charts are bad take, then maybe try Best Loser Wins, or if you want this message along with some Eastern Spiritual woo-woo anything by Van Tharp.
p.s. did you actually read all of this? Why did you do that? Seriously, when am I going to find interests that my goodreads friends would actually care about (are they here anymore? Am I?) But if you did and you are interested in this kind of nerdy thing and are interested in bouncing some ideas around feel free to reach out to me.
I've stopped reading trading books that are 'strategic' or promise secrets or setups, but I saw a copy of this and picked it up because it was nice and short and I thought it might do well with being a kind of Eastern (written by a Westerner though) take on the Transcendental Phenomenology ideas towards the markets that I've been playing with.
And the first part of the book is just different words for what I've been thinking about. He uses zen, I've been using epoche. Tom a toe, tom ah toe.
Then he starts giving advice.
One he claims that history doesn't repeat and thinking that it does will result in disastrous results. He kind of has a point, but every (EVERY!) bull market will at some point claim to be unlike every other one and won't end (when people are starting to say this, start taking a look around for the exits because shits going to get ugly real soon (similarly if people who would never own something like Crypto are now experts in it you can be assured it's about to fucking crash hard)). But while I'm pointing out that history does repeat, his examples are the Bearish pundits of the mid-80's saying that it can't go higher, and the people who kept trying to pick tops and got their asses handed to them when new highs kept being met (you know until that day in October in 1987). He points to the fact that after Black Monday people Great Depression Part 2, but were met with a market that quickly shrugged the day off and would go on making new highs, and he points to the fact that Japan's Bear Market at the time was slogging on and talking heads were expecting the same to happen in the rest of the world.
This isn't a good reason to ignore history though, but because he is ignoring it I'm assuming that his ahistorical take doesn't take into account that in the Great Depression and say the brutal Bear Market of the early 70's shorting wasn't a common strategy. In the 60's for example shorting was considered Anti-American, and it wasn't until the late 60's things like Hedge Funds, that weren't long only funds became a thing and would grow in popularity. So why is this important? Well if there isn't large scale shorting going on and everyone is selling then capital / value / money is just disappearing, but when prices are falling and people are profiting off of the fall the capital is changing hands and gets redeployed into the market, as opposed to leaving a wasteland in the wake (yeah it sucks that people lose lots of money, and things like retirement funds blow up and all of that, but the fact that it doesn't take a decade or more to recover is the better than no one profiting and shit being really bad for a really long time (yes I'm the person who wrote how much he hates capitalism in my review of JR!)). So there is that, which is something which people on financial TV and in the media don't seem to understand since they will use terms like Wealth Evaporating, when it's just changing hands. For another example look how quickly the market rebounded after mid February and March 2020. And no it wasn't because of fucking stimulus checks.
Anyway to keep on this point. He points to the differences between the Japanese recovery and the rest of the world as an example of history doesn't repeat. But, the customs of Japan also made it that recovery would be slow. The market was grossly over priced when it crashed because of a lack of liquidity. It was considered disrespectful for a company to sell stocks of another company, so companies would have massive amounts of stocks of other companies and were honor bound to hold on to them. This leads to it also being disrespectful for major players to short the market, and when buyers disappeared all the market could do was go down and capital evaporated. This makes a very difficult situation to rebuild from (this is a very simplistic look, and really I only know bits and pieces of this, but the point is it's not ahistorical and outside of an understanding of history and culture).
Next, and this might be more a thing of the times he wrote the book in (early 90's) and being right before the advent of massive amounts of electronic trading, he claims multiple times charts are useless and will only lose you money. At the time he was a pit trader (I think, it's a little unclear), so there is something different about that, but I don't know how someone reading this book who claims this book has improved their trading does with just maybe having a raw feed of tick data. It's bad advice to give up on charts unless maybe you are one of the last remaining pit traders and can 'feel' the digital currents around you.
Last, and certainly not least he offers a way to succeed in the market. He says it's simple you buy when the price is going up and sell when it's going down. He says price goes up twice and it's a trend. What does that mean, two ticks up? Two bars or periods up? What constitutes going up, especially if you remove all history to relate it to? He admits that this will get you chopped up, but being chopped up is better than being massacred. Even though you can blow up and account being chopped up with lots of small losses, especially when you add in the spread and commissions.
And he says to hold on to winners and cut losers, but how does one hold onto a winner when any movement down twice would be considered the market moving down? There is an irrationality, which one might say (if one has read the book) is me being ego driven or an Aristotelean for pointing out (which I may be the first, but not the second, I'm quite firmly post-modern in my take of the markets and believe that syllogistic / rational thinking is counter-productive to understanding), to the book and the message he presents. And my guess is that if he is a successful trader it's not because he's following the advice he is giving but is using this unconscious knowledge of years of trading to have a 'feel' for the market. And he isn't buying just because the price is going up and selling just because price is going down.
If there were a genre of hippy trading manuals this would be in it. If you are looking for a book that incorporates the good ideas of this book, but without the weird history and charts are bad take, then maybe try Best Loser Wins, or if you want this message along with some Eastern Spiritual woo-woo anything by Van Tharp.
p.s. did you actually read all of this? Why did you do that? Seriously, when am I going to find interests that my goodreads friends would actually care about (are they here anymore? Am I?) But if you did and you are interested in this kind of nerdy thing and are interested in bouncing some ideas around feel free to reach out to me.
August 6, 2019
Good book overall. It goes over the fundamental ideas that hold people back from realizing the basic functions of life. It also delves into the bare bone basics of market success; trends, cutting losses, etc. I had a great time with it.
-Jeff G (Author of Modicum).
-Jeff G (Author of Modicum).
May 27, 2020
Decent overview of a 'mindful' approach to financial markets and the idea of following the market rather than trying to fight it. Nothing particularly new, but then the book was first released in 1992 and way ahead of its time.
February 27, 2021
This book open my eyes to myself, help me identify what was holding me back in trading.
December 29, 2019
Lack of understanding by the use of low or high, from a Zen point of view there is no such a thing as high or low, everything is what it is without adjectives. All of this stems from a rigid superego's position in the idea that the ego is a bad thing. Good vs bad is a paradox that can only be solved by forgiveness and compassion and by seeing that ultimately means "desirable" and that has no basis in reality. Sad that a "Zen" book cannot see "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so".
Some good ideas overall, but lacking in sophistication.
Some good ideas overall, but lacking in sophistication.
March 1, 2017
this is a very zenish book as the title suggests. it gives one simple idea: battle ur ego through meditation.
try many kinds of it before you find something suitable.
do haiku!
very short book, and giving one powerful idea - battle with your ego.
i would say rather too short, it could elaborate more on meditation.
it s a long blog post than a book, but it still counts as book in my reading challenge!
try many kinds of it before you find something suitable.
do haiku!
very short book, and giving one powerful idea - battle with your ego.
i would say rather too short, it could elaborate more on meditation.
it s a long blog post than a book, but it still counts as book in my reading challenge!
February 6, 2014
Excellent!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews