Imagine making 50x, 200x or even 1,000x return on your investment.
Those are the returns that are possible when you buy and sell expensive trading books.
If you are going to buy trading books to educate yourself anyway, it’s worth looking for the books on this list too.
Some of these books are worth a lot of money, but many people end up throwing them away because these books don’t look expensive and most people don’t anything about trading.
So if you know what to look for, you can get these books for cheap…like $1 cheap.
I’ll show you my list of books to keep an eye out for, and more importantly…how to accurately value almost any trading book.
You may want to even keep a few of these books for yourself.
Remember that trading books is like trading in any other market. Their value can increase/decrease according to supply/demand. So be sure to check the current market value of a book before you buy it to resell.
Before I get into the list, if valuable trading books don’t interest you, then you can see our other trading book lists here:
- The best books on trading psychology
- The best trading books of all-time
Be on the Lookout for These Valuable Trading Books
Margin of Safety
By Seth Klarman
I consider this the grail of valuable trading books. I’ve seen this book sell for as little as $500 and for as much as $1,500.
If it’s signed, it could be worth more.
It it one of the most useful books on value investing in stocks and takes its title from Benjamin Graham’s teaching to invest with a “margin of safety.”
This book is also said to have been influential in Warren Buffet’s investment education.
Graham’s book The Intelligent Investor has been reprinted many times, so it’s not worth much on the used market.
But a legit copy of Margin of Safety is hard to come by, making it much more valuable.
See what they are going for here…
Beat the Market
By Edward Thorp
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Thorp is well-known for his book Beat the Dealer, in which he exposed his revolutionary, math-based Blackjack strategy that allows ordinary people to beat the odds in Las Vegas. Apply his Blackjack strategy correctly and you will get banned from casinos.
But what a lot of people don’t know is that Thorp also developed a strategy for trading the stock market.
This book details his stock trading strategy.
I’ve personally bought this book several times, for as little as $1…and I’ve sold it for as much as $120.
Definitely a trading book to watch out for.
Building Reliable Trading Systems: Tradable Strategies That Perform as They Backtest and Meet Your Risk-Reward Goals
By Keith Fitschen
Building reliable trading strategies is a little bit of an art, but it’s mostly science.
A rules-based trading methodology is harder to create than most people realize.
This book gets into the science of how to develop winning trading strategies and how to make sure that a strategy will trade as well in the live market, as it did in backtesting.
That’s no small task, so I can see why this book is in demand.
Day Trading With Short Term Price Patterns and Opening Range Breakout
By Toby Crabel
I heard about this book from Walter Peters and it’s super collectable.
I’m not big of day trading the stock market, so I haven’t actually dug into this one yet.
But the value of this book has been very consistent over time and many people say that it’s super useful, no matter which market you trade.
Regardless if you want to get this book for the information or the market value, this is one book worth looking out for.
Street Smarts
By Larry Connors and Linda Raschke
This book was published in 1996, but it still remains popular today. It’s widely regarded as one of the best futures trading books ever written.
You may know Linda from the book The New Market Wizards by Jack Schwager.
The Kindle version sells for $175, so you know this book is legit.
Here’s what in the book:
- Swing Trading – The backbone of Linda’s success. Not only will you learn exactly how to swing trade, you will also learn specific advanced techniques never before made public!
- News – Among the strategies revealed is an intra-day news strategy they use to exploit the herd when the 8:30am economic reports are released. This strategy will be especially appreciated by bond traders and currency traders.
- Pattern Recognition – You will learn some of the best short-term set-up patterns available. Larry and Linda will also teach you how they combine these patterns with other strategies to identify explosive moves.
- ADX – In our opinion, ADX is one of the most powerful and misunderstood indicators available to traders. Now, for the first time, they reveal a handful of short-term trading strategies they use in conjunction with this terrific indicator.
- Volatility – You will learn how to identify markets that are about to explode and how to trade these exciting situations.
- Also, included are chapters on trading volatility, trading Crabel, trading the smart money index, trading gap reversals, a special chapter on professional money management, and many other trading strategies!
The Random Character of Stock Market Prices
Edited By Paul H. Cootner
I don’t know much about this book because there is very limited information about it online. The best description I found was on GoodReads:
“This work is known to a generation of financial economists having marked the beginnings of the field known as financial econometrics.”
In other words, it’s a classic.
The only other thing I know is that it sells for between $50-$150 on Amazon.
One Strategy for All Markets
by J.L. Lord
J.L. Lord is actually the pen name of Scott from Stratagem Trade.
He has written over 15 books under that name. Scott is an accomplished Options trader/educator and has a cult-like following.
Even though not all of his books are listed on Amazon, most of them could probably sell for a decent amount of money.
Since there isn’t much sales data on these books, I can’t say for sure however.
This book teaches the BWB trading strategy or the Broken Wing Butterfly options strategy.
Even professional traders may not know about these books, so you might be able to get a good deal on them.
You might also be interested in: Option Greeks for Profits
Those are the only two books that had sales data. They have sold for between $148 and $350.
Those are the big ones that I know of, but there are probably more books that I’ve missed. There are some really old texts that are even more valuable, but they are extremely rare and something most people won’t come across in their lifetime.
I’ve only listed more modern books that you are likely to find at a library sale or used book store.
If you have a hunch that a random book might be valuable, here’s how to figure it out…
How to Research the Market Value of a Trading Book
In reality, most used trading books will only be worth $10 or less.
Anyone can list a trading book on eBay for $1,000. If someone will actually pay that or not, is another story.
So when you are researching an old trading book, you need to see the comparable sales, or what people are actually buying a book for.
The best places to get this information from are:
- eBay
- Amazon
How to Value Books on eBay
Finding comparable sales on eBay is easy.
- Do a search for the title of the book
- Check Sold Items in the sidebar on the left
See if any of those books sold and for how much. The only tricky part about using eBay is that they don’t give you the sold price if the seller accepted a best offer and they only provide a 90 day price history.
That can be enough to figure out the value of a book.
How to Value Books on Amazon
You can get a good sales history for most books on Amazon. But in order to do that, you also need to have a couple of extra things.
First, you will need the Keepa Chrome plugin for the Google Chrome browser. After you install this plugin, you will be able to see sales history for any book that Keepa tracks, when you visit the Amazon website.
Next, you will need to have a Keepa subscription. It currently costs about $16/month.
You can also use CamelCamelCamel for free. But they lost a large portion of their historical database recently, so Keepa is a more reliable source of pricing information.
Just follow their tutorials or watch some YouTube videos on how to use their service.
Final Thoughts on Valuable Trading Books
The next time you come across any of these books, you can figure out how much they are worth and how much you should pay for them, in order to turn a profit.
To get more book recommendations, check out these trading book lists:
- Best trading psychology books
- Best trading books of all-time
If you know of other valuable trading books that we missed, we would love to hear about it.
Contact us and let us know.
Disclaimer: Some links on this page are affiliate links. We do make a commission if you purchase through these links, but it does not cost you anything extra and we only promote products and services that we personally use and wholeheartedly believe in. A portion of the proceeds are donated to my charity partners.