
LINDA RASCHKE
Professional futures and equities trader featured in Market Wizards, known for short-term technical trading
Linda Raschke started trading on the Pacific Exchange floor in 1981 at a time when women on a trading floor were still genuinely unusual. She made money consistently for decades using technical patterns and short-term momentum. Jack Schwager put her in "The New Market Wizards" alongside Soros and Jones. She is not a billionaire, she does not manage outside capital at scale, and she has never claimed to be something she is not. She is simply one of the most technically rigorous short-term traders who has ever done this professionally, and she has been doing it for over 40 years.
Net Worth
$20 million
Nationality
American
Time Horizon
Swing
Risk Appetite
6 / 10
CAREER & BACKGROUND
Raschke grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and developed an interest in markets through her father, who traded commodities. She studied music and economics at Occidental College and after graduation got a job as an options market maker on the Pacific Stock Exchange floor in 1981.
She learned to trade through the experience of being on a live floor — reading order flow, reading other traders, understanding momentum in real time.
She traded options on the floor through the early 1980s, then transitioned to futures trading — S&P 500 futures, interest rate futures, and commodity futures — in the mid-1980s. In 1992 Jack Schwager featured her in "The New Market Wizards," which brought her a wider audience.
She went on to run LBR Group, a commodity trading advisor, from the 1990s through the 2010s. She now trades her own capital and shares her analysis publicly.
COMPANIES & ROLES
LBR Group was her commodity trading advisory firm, which ran managed accounts for institutional clients from roughly the 1990s to the mid-2010s. She managed hundreds of millions in client capital during the firm''s peak years.
The firm closed to outside investors as she shifted focus to her own capital and to public trading education.
She maintains an active presence on social media and through her website, sharing daily market commentary and chart analysis. She is one of the few traders of her generation who adapted successfully to the digital media environment — posting trade ideas, sharing setups, and maintaining an audience of serious traders who follow her technical read of markets in real time.
INVESTING STYLE & PHILOSOPHY
Raschke is a short-term technical trader. She works primarily with momentum, mean reversion, and pattern recognition across time frames ranging from intraday to several weeks.
She is not a long-term investor. She does not have views on company fundamentals.
She trades price behavior — what the market is doing right now, where the momentum is, where the natural support and resistance levels are.
She has written and spoken extensively about specific technical setups: the Holy Grail setup (a pullback to the 20-day moving average in a trending market), the 80-20 rule (when markets open at or near one end of the previous day''s range, they tend to reach the other end), and various momentum oscillator signals. Her edge is pattern recognition built from decades of watching markets.
THE PLAYBOOK
Risk Approach
Raschke is disciplined about position sizing and stopping out when wrong. Short-term trading forces this — if you don''t have clear stops, a short-term trade can quickly become a long-term mistake and then a catastrophe.
She has talked about the importance of knowing your risk before you enter a trade, not after. She uses relatively small position sizes as a percentage of capital, trades frequently, and relies on consistency rather than on any single large bet.
Money Habits
Raschke is private about personal finances in the way that self-funded traders typically are — she has no obligation to disclose her wealth and has never made extravagant lifestyle claims. She lives in Connecticut.
She is known for being direct, sometimes blunt, and focused entirely on the craft of trading rather than personal branding. She has resisted the finance influencer template that many traders adopt.
BIGGEST WIN
There is no single trade that defines Raschke the way Black Monday defines Paul Tudor Jones. Her edge has always been consistency over time rather than one spectacular call.
She has compounded profitably for over four decades using short-term strategies — a track record that most traders cannot come close to matching even over ten years. Being featured in "The New Market Wizards" alongside macro legends was itself a validation of a decade of consistent performance that Jack Schwager verified before including her.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
Raschke has been candid about the transition from floor trading to screen trading in the 1990s as a genuine adjustment — the informational advantages of a floor trader largely disappeared when markets moved electronic. She has also discussed the challenge of adapting to algorithmic markets, where many short-term patterns that worked in the 1980s and 1990s are either more crowded or have disappeared.
Her willingness to keep learning and adapting is what has kept her relevant.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
Raschke believes that markets have consistent behavioral patterns because humans have consistent psychological patterns. Momentum, mean reversion, and overreaction are not random — they reflect greed, fear, and herd behavior, which do not change.
Her philosophy is that a trader''s job is to have a better model of short-term market behavior than the average participant, and to execute that model consistently with strict risk control. She does not believe in predicting direction with certainty.
She believes in finding setups where the probability distribution is skewed in her favor.
FAMILY & PERSONAL LIFE
Raschke keeps her personal life private. She has spoken about the challenge of balancing a trading career with family life and has noted that screen-based trading eventually made that balance more manageable than floor trading.
She is active on Twitter/X and posts market analysis regularly, giving her a public presence that is focused entirely on markets rather than on personal narrative.
EDUCATION
Occidental College, BA in Music and Economics, 1981. She has cited her music background as useful for pattern recognition — both music and technical analysis involve seeing structure and patterns in sequences.
She got her real education on the floor of the Pacific Stock Exchange, which she describes as the best trading school that ever existed.
BOOKS & RESOURCES
The most complete public interview she has given about her trading philosophy, early career, and approach to risk. Reading it alongside her more recent Twitter/X commentary shows how consistently she has applied the same principles across forty years
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QUOTES (6)
Know your risk before you enter the trade. Not after. After is too late.
Markets have personality. They have tendencies. Momentum tends to continue. Overextension tends to revert. These patterns exist because people exist.
The floor taught me everything I needed to know about trading. You learned fast or you lost fast. There was no in-between.
Most traders fail because they are inconsistent. They follow their rules when they're winning and abandon them when they're losing. That is exactly backwards.
I have one edge: I have been watching these patterns for forty years. The market keeps making the same moves. I just have to be patient enough to wait for them.
Short-term trading is about probability, not certainty. If you are looking for certainty, go buy index funds. If you want to trade, learn to be comfortable being wrong often and right more.
NETFIGO SCORE
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