Linda Bradford Raschke - Trading Sardines - Lessons in the Markets from a Lifelong Trader

Trading Sardines celebrates grit and resilience in the financial markets.

It is a hilarious, honest, and poignant account of the evolution of a professional trader over nearly four decades. From the raucous trading floors of the early eighties to the days of giant server racks thirty years later, the reader takes a chronological trip through the markets, trading strategies, and unimaginable events, watching how one woman responds with unblinking honesty.

Linda Raschke shares a lifetime of market lessons while highlighting the tension between luck, risk, and passion. Along the way, she shows that perseverance can overcome the most inconceivable challenges, both in life and in trading. Her stories, documented with charts and photos, will keep you captivated and prove that humor may just be the key ingredient for survival. You wont hear these types of tales anywhere elsethis is the REAL world of trading.

This book will motivate every trader, no matter the level of proficiency and experience. Lindas success is testimony that you dont have to be perfect, you just have to stay in the game.

Linda Bradford Raschke (born 1959) is an American trader, investor and hedge fund manager. She held memberships on the Pacific Stock Exchange and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in the early eighties before founding LBRGRoup, a CTA (Commodity Trading Advisor).

She started several successful hedge funds, both onshore and offshore, and rose to the top of the ranks in hedge fund performance. She is mentioned in many trading books, including Jack Schwagers New Market Wizards. She lives in Florida and Illinois with her husband Damon, and her horses, where she continues to actively trade and invest.

She holds a BA in Economics and in Music Composition from Occidental College (1980).

The Edge there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.

Hunter S. Thompson

I wrote this book because nobody could believe all the crazy things which have happened to me in the financial trading industry. When I was a market maker on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the specialist in the pit where I stood said, Truth is stranger than fiction. It is impossible to make these events up. I started out trading in San Francisco on the Pacific Coast Exchange where there was one of the best business libraries in the country. The first book I checked out was about catastrophe theory. This is a concept used to show how gradual changes to a system can produce sudden drastic results. A stock market crash is an obvious example. It never caught on as a legitimate model of price behavior because it had no predictive value. But it opened my eyes to the fact that there is so much that we cant model. We live in an abstract nonlinear world that is in conflict with our human biases.

Despite the increased awareness over the past two decades of black swans, fat tails, and chaotic events, otherwise known as outliers, people tend to be more comfortable engaging in straight lined thinking. Fuzzy variables are messy. The unknown is uncomfortable.

Yet trading is about decision making under uncertainty. This is my journey as a trader where my knack for being on the wrong side of outliers and unforeseen events is well beyond random. Some of the challenges and obstacles along the way were self-created. Some were plain old bad luck. But part of this story is about how to pull yourself up by the bootstraps yet one more time and keep a positive attitude. How to persevere, the work and single-mindedness required to succeed, and above all, how to maintain a healthy sense of humor to keep ones sanity.

It was not my intent to write an autobiography but to share some of the more interesting and useful lessons I learned on my journey. Hopefully, an astute trader will get some ideas to further their own research or see different ways of looking at things. For those who are newer to the financial trading industry, it might be an eye-opener as to how many potholes can pepper the road to success.