Stocks, Futures, and Options Magazine will be out with an article in December on its top ten trading books for 2009 – the list includes Mobs.

This really tickles me, because at heart, I’m a trader, albeit an amateur. Nothing like watching the charts – the heart-beat of the great capital markets. There’s a real romance to it. Had I been born some place else, I think I’d have run away from school and gone to work in one of the exchanges.

I also just saw that Mobs was on the list of top ten best-selling finance books on Amazon for 2008. That’s great news, but a bit of a surprise, because there were so many books published on the economy that year, I thought it would get edged out. Hopefully, the book will sell well this year too, because it really does have a lot of good information for anyone who trades/invests.

I’d advise you to especially read Chapter 16, which is a mini-manual that’s as insightful a look as you’ll find anywhere about what it takes to make good decisions on trades (It’s my co-author’s work, so you know that’s an honest opinion, unbiased by my problems with the book’s promotion, about which I’ve written at length before).

My contributions – such as they are – to “trading psychology” are Chapters 10 and 11 of Mobs, where I deal with “herd mentality” and how it affects and eludes quantification in economics. It’s more of the macro view. I think parts of that can be found on the web in articles I wrote for Endervidualism..

The rest of Mobs is more historical and less immediately relevant to trading per se. although the history of the housing and credit bubble will help give you the background you need to understand what’s going on now.