Schwager, Jack D. 1948-

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Schwager, Jack D. 1948-

PERSONAL:

Born June 27, 1948, in Antwerp, Belgium; naturalized U.S. citizen; son of Emil and Margaret Schwager; married Jo Ann Wolkov, May 10, 1974; children: Daniel, Zachary, Samantha. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, B.A.; Brown University, M.A. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Vineyard Haven, MA. Agent—Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency, Inc., 146 W. 82nd St., Ste. 1B, New York, NY 10024. E-mail—jack@jackschwager.com.

CAREER:

Fortune Group (alternative asset management group), London, England, investment director; worked for more than twenty years as a director of futures research for various financial firms in New York, NY, including Prudential Securities, Paine Webber, and Smith Barney; founder and former principal of Market Wizard Funds. Speaker at seminars.

WRITINGS:

A Complete Guide to the Futures Market: Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Trading, Spreads, and Options, Wiley (New York, NY), 1984, revised and expanded edition published as Schwager on Futures, Volume 1: Fundamental Analysis, 1995, Volume 2: Technical Analysis, 1996, Volume 3: Managed Trading: Myths and Truths, 1996.

Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders, New York Institute of Finance (New York, NY), 1989.

The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders, HarperBusiness (New York, NY), 1992.

Getting Started in Technical Analysis, Wiley (New York, NY), 1999.

Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders, HarperBusiness (New York, NY), 2001, revised edition, 2003.

Contributor to magazines, including Commodities.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jack D. Schwager has spent most of his adult life working in the futures market; he has also had a successful career writing books that explain the intricacies of futures trading to others. Schwager did his first writing for Commodities magazine in the 1970s. In 1984 he published A Complete Guide to the Futures Market: Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Trading, Spreads, and Options, a 740-page tome that quickly became a classic. Shortly after its publication, Stanley Kroll, in a review for Financial World, called the book "an excellent and comprehensive work that deserves careful study." Kroll also noted Schwager's "articulate and professional presentation" as even more impressive than his credentials, which at that time included stints as the director of commodities research for three different prestigious brokerages.

A decade later Schwager revised and expanded A Complete Guide to the Futures Market. The new work, Schwager on Futures, was published in three volumes, Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, and Managed Trading: Myths and Truths. The Fundamental Analysis volume rivaled the size of the original guide, and Technical Analysis actually exceeded it. This work was also well received, with Darrell R. Jobman of Futures saying of the Fundamental Analysis volume, "This is just another piece of solid work by Schwager, one of the best minds in the futures industry who continues to produce some of the most useful, most enduring research and insightful writing for this generation of traders."

Schwager also wrote books of interviews with some of the leading traders of the time. One of them, Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders, prompted Schwager to start his own fund, Market Wizard Funds, which invested in the hedge funds run by some of the traders he interviewed for that book. "I've come to the point where really I've decided there are too many people out there who do this a lot better than I do," he said in an interview published in Sunday Business. "Hence I would rather apply what I do to identifying those people and placing money with them."

Schwager once told CA: "My ‘Market Wizards’ series was inspired by a quest to find out what separates people who achieve spectacular success in the markets from everyone else. My goal is to write books that will contain information that even financial professionals will find useful, but to do so in a way that is an enjoyable read and understandable to the lay person. Although I have had numerous people tell me that these books inspired them to change careers, my favorite compliments are along the line of ‘I read your book on my beach vacation.’

"The bulk of these books are the sections written in interview format. Verbatim interviews make awful reading. The key is to reshape the interview so that it stays true to the subject but becomes readable. My methodology consists of the following steps: research for appropriate interview subjects; conduct a two-to eight-hour interview; listen to the raw tape and redictate (in edited language) any portions that might be used for a chapter (typically, only about five to twenty-five percent); transcribe, reshuffle, and heavily edit this streamlined tape; continue to edit drafts until I stop trip- ping over text that is inadequate or misplaced; and write prose sections for chapter introductions and conclusions."

Schwager later added: "I was inspired by Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin LeFevre, a book that still rang true as a source of market trading wisdom seventy years after it was written (which is when I read it). The book, which is widely believed to be based on the trading experiences of Jesse Livermore, provides such an authentic representation of the trading experience that many believe that the author's name is a pseudonym for Livermore. It is not; LeFevre was a journalist and writer. My goal was to write a modern-day volume that, like LeFevre's book, would still be read seventy years in the future because it contained truths about markets and trading that were timeless."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Barron's, February 19, 1996, Stanley W. Angrist, reviews of Schwager on Futures, Volume 1: Fundamental Analysis and Schwager on Futures, Volume 2: Technical Analysis, pp. 57-57A; January 27, 1997, Gene Epstein, "Soybeans and Greenbacks," p. MW14; May 26, 1997, Gene Epstein, "Buck Bear" (interview with Jack Schwager), pp. 22-23; January 18, 1999, Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, "Not a Trendy Year; Which Makes Trading Tougher, Says One Pro," p. MW18.

Booklist, November 15, 1992, David Rouse, review of The New Market Wizards: Conversations with America's Top Traders, p. 566; May 15, 1995, David Rouse, review of Schwager on Futures, Volume 1: Fundamental Analysis, p. 1620; December 15, 2000, David Rouse, review of Stock Market Wizards: Interviews with America's Top Stock Traders, p. 768.

Financial News, August 20, 2001, "Schwager Puts Book Research to Practical Use and Launches Fund."

Financial World, April 17, 1985, Stanley Kroll, review of A Complete Guide to the Futures Markets: Fundamental Analysis, Technical Analysis, Trading, Spreads, and Options, p. 62.

Forbes, September 10, 1984, Stanley W. Angrist, review of A Complete Guide to the Futures Market, p. 226.

Futures, September, 1984, review of A Complete Guide to the Futures Market, p. 114; October, 1989, Jon Stein, review of Market Wizards: Interviews with Top Traders, p. 14; October, 1992, Ginger Szala and Gibbons Burke, "Fine Young Traders: Stars of the '90s?," pp. 74-76; November, 1992, Darrell R. Jobman, review of The New Market Wizards, pp. 70-71; October, 1995, Darrell R. Jobman, review of Schwager on Futures: Fundamental Analysis, p. 94; October, 1996, Darrell R. Jobman, review of Schwager on Futures: Technical Analysis, pp. 78-79; February, 2001, Daniel P. Collins, "More Market Wizardry," p. 20.

Library Journal, December, 2000, Richard Drezen, review of Stock Market Wizards, p. 157.

New York Times, July 8, 2001, Edward Wyatt, "Going Back to the Well, or Rather, the Cauldron," p. BU16.

Pension World, March, 1990, review of Market Wizards, p. 64.

Personal Investor, July, 1999, review of Getting Started in Technical Analysis, pp. 12-13.

Publishers Weekly, November 2, 1992, review of The New Market Wizards, p. 56; November 20, 2000, review of Stock Market Wizards, p. 57.

Sunday Business, March 11, 2001, "Pick Any of a Million Ways to Make Money," p. 22M; August 5, 2001, "Hedging against Macho Investing," p. 17C.

U.S. News & World Report, October 19, 1992, Jack Egan, review of The New Market Wizards, p. 79.

Wall Street Journal, July 24, 1989, Stanley W. Angrist, review of Market Wizards, p. A12; December 23, 1992, pp. A7-A8; January 31, 2001, Stanley W. Angrist, "The Road to Investment Success, with a Few Mistakes along the Way," p. A19.