There's No Single "Right" Way to Trade
Schwager's most fundamental finding: the traders in this book succeeded using methods that often directly contradicted each other.
The single most striking pattern across Schwager's interviews is how little the successful traders agreed with each other on specific method — some were purely technical, refusing to consider a company's or economy's fundamentals at all; others were fundamentally driven, treating chart patterns as largely irrelevant noise; some held positions for months, others for minutes; some concentrated heavily in a handful of high-conviction trades, others diversified across dozens of small positions.
Schwager's own conclusion, stated directly in the book, is that this diversity isn't a contradiction to be resolved — it's evidence that there's no single universally correct trading method, and that searching for "the" right approach (as opposed to the right approach for a specific individual's own temperament and strengths) is itself a common, costly mistake among traders who never reach this level of success.
This finding sets the frame for the entire book, and for this course. Because the traders profiled genuinely disagreed on method, the book can't be read as a manual for a single system — it has to be read as a study of what those otherwise-contradictory approaches had in common underneath the surface. That underlying commonality, covered in this course's next chapter, turns out to be risk management rather than any specific technique, which is part of why Market Wizards has remained relevant across market eras and asset classes very different from the ones the original interview subjects traded.
| Approach | Example from the book |
|---|---|
| Pure technical, no fundamentals | Traders who explicitly stated fundamentals played no role in their entry/exit decisions |
| Fundamentally driven, chart-skeptical | Traders who treated technical patterns as largely irrelevant to their process |
| Short holding periods | Traders who held positions for minutes to days, reacting quickly to price action |
| Long holding periods | Traders who held core positions for months, riding out short-term volatility |
If the book had profiled traders who all agreed on a specific method, the natural takeaway would be to copy that method directly. Because the successful traders profiled genuinely disagreed with each other on specifics, the actual, more valuable lesson has to be at a higher level of abstraction — not "do what trader X did" but "find the specific approach that fits your own temperament, information advantages, and risk tolerance," a theme this course's next chapter develops directly.
A common misreading of the method-diversity finding is to conclude that trading method barely matters at all, since clearly-different approaches all produced legendary results — but that misreads what the diversity is actually showing. Every method profiled in the book was, within its own internal logic, rigorous, specific, and consistently applied — the diversity is across methods, not an absence of method within any individual trader. A purely technical trader in the book still followed specific, well-defined rules for entries and exits; a fundamentally-driven trader still did deep, specific analytical work before committing capital. What varied was which specific method, not whether a real method existed at all.
This distinction matters for how a reader should actually use the book. The lesson is not "trade however feels right, method is irrelevant" — it is "there are multiple legitimate paths to a rigorous method, so find the one whose specific demands you can actually meet consistently, and then apply it with the same rigor every trader in this book applied to their own chosen approach."
- Schwager's interviewed traders succeeded using methods that often directly contradicted each other — pure technical versus fundamental, short-term versus long-term, concentrated versus diversified.
- This diversity is presented as the book's central finding, not an inconvenient inconsistency — there's no single universally correct trading method to copy.
- The practical lesson has to sit above any single trader's specific technique: finding a personally-fitting approach matters more than adopting any one interviewed trader's exact method.
- The diversity is across methods, not an absence of method within any individual trader — every approach profiled was internally rigorous and consistently applied, which is a different lesson than "method does not matter."
- This finding sets up the rest of the book: because no single technique explains the results, the more useful search is for what these otherwise-contradictory traders shared underneath their differing methods.