Presumably M.W refers to The Essays of Warren Buffet and similar works that cover his discourses over the years. There's no shortage of those. Whether the books are a dominant proportion of Al Brooks' trading "education" business or not is irrelevant, they're part of building his brand, so if it's not books making money it's courses or chat room access or whatever. And I don't even know if he has made serious money at all as I already wrote. The bad taste "the haters" here have is because Brooks preys on the uneducated, as does a huge part of the online portion of the trading landscape. In the case of people helping each other for free (on e.g. ET) it's the blind leading the blind and not immoral, but then you have the snakeoil vendors actively making an immoral choice for an income.
'The Essays of Warren Buffet' is basically a compilation of excerpts from Warren Buffet's letters to his shareholders given in the annual reports. I did read that book. Actually reading the annual reports and the letters directly from the company's website provides a better context in which those quotes were made. Unless we go to the original text, we miss many things while reading. You got to acknowledge that many readers did benefit from Al Brooks' books. Why is this fact discounted over comments from people who did not read his books? If you read his books and are able disprove the points mentioned therein, then these haters can get some credibility. Magically, those who read those books end up learning something from them.
Well I think the annoyance comes from there's this presumption that here's this guy, on YouTube, usually hosted by a presenter, that gives the impression he is unloading wisdom and valuable jems for mostly enjoyment and fame. So you really tune in and devote a lot of attention. You would think there is something in what he says that you could start earning, because it's not presented like hey, I'm withholding pretty much everything till you buy this book. I actually don't remember any hard promotions for a book, or even soft promotions, maybe I forgot. But my idea of marketing is you've got to give something up front, then, if I can make money with that, then I'm going to spend some of that money and go deeper with books and manuals, if you have them. In fact I have studied information marketing and my influencers admitted first of all, most things being sold for $199 can be found for $5 somewhere. They also advised giving substance in your lead product, for $29, merely to expand on what substance you already gave away. Thus, people don't actually need to buy your $199 package, which leads to the $2000 in person seminar. If you offer money back guarantees all along the way then everybody's happy to pay a lot more for the $5 info that you resold for $29. In theory Brooks could give it all away in these countless youtube presentations and would still do well on the "back end", which one presumed might be a seminar somewhere, not sure, or a chat group. So I was looking for the meat that a good marketer would put out there that you can chew on and turn into cash, that you would be happy to spend on a seminar. But I don't feel I ever got it, and I am annoyed because I consider myself a good student/learner, but could not get a grip on even one thing. So, can you think of even one thing he gives for free that can be turned into cash? Something that comes from Brooks, and not just a $5 paperback that I can order from Amazon? I mean, if there is a necessity to read, then he should be more clear about that and not act like he just gave it to you when he clearly didn't. It felt like he was flexing on me at my expense. Anyway, I don't know of any books or you tubes that exactly matches the solution I finally devised for myself. Is it possible I synthesized something from Brooks? I don't know. I don't think so, last time I checked what he was saying. I did prove though, that candlesticks are all that is needed.
Al Brooks does not provide direct setups. He explains market nature. And this helped me in developing my systems. BTW, Al Brooks did not invent any thing new like Bollinger invented Bollinger Bands etc. Al Brooks merely discusses the market in well known technical analysis terms. The only addition he does is to add the concept of context and location to set ups. Most set ups were already discussed in Edwards Magee book and in Japanese candlesticks books. Al Brooks says these cannot be used in isolation. He brings in the concept of context and location. Many ET members blame him, since, he appears to contradict himself when he says, that he does not use indicators on one hand, while, he uses 20 ema on his charts. He does not use the ema in the traditional approach for which it is generally used. He uses the ema for identifying the location of the current bar. Context+Location+setup is what increases the probability of trade. He also discusses the situations where several trades fail. Using Al Brooks approach as base, several of his students have built trading systems. One popular one is http://ninetrans.blogspot.com/ I also use some of the setups described in this blog. One of them is 'single legged move to ema' which is my favorite. Then there is also another one 'single legged move from one end of trading range to the other'. All these set ups prod us into thinking like what does it mean if the move to ema is not single legged? Or what does it mean if the move from one end of trading range to the other is in two or three legs? Only if one reads Al Brooks book, and, gets a grasp of the building blocks of the price action theory, one can understand these approaches given in the blog, else it is difficult to use them as set ups without getting a grasp of the underlying theory. Another student is nodoji who is a member of ET. I used to follow her journal and that inspired me to buy Al Brooks books. Al Brooks books cannot be read through like a novel. One has to read every topic, make notes then understand the concepts, move to the next topic and see how each topic ties into the big scheme of things. It is more like a semester course. One set up I like is MTR, which Al Brooks discussed in the book trilogy. When I read about major trend reversal (MTR), I thought there is something else called minor trend reversal! LOL. I later realized that it is just a name that Al Brooks gave to the set up. I made my whole notes on that topic in just one power point slide with mind maps. Reading through that topic would normally take a long time to understand what he is saying. I would rather call that topic as 'Confirmed Reversal' rather than MTR. This approach of making notes helps a lot in designing our own system. I am sharing a screenshot of my notes if it helps other readers. Al Brooks already warned you in the book title. The book is for serious traders. I would say that it is for serious traders who are also serious readers. PS: I don't use 5 min time frame for all my setups. I use Al Brooks approach, but in hourly time frame. The instruments that I trade are also different from what Al generally discusses.
When you understand how easily Trump could and continues to bullshit half of Americans, then it becomes easier to understand Al Brooks game.
Here’s a conditional probability question for the forum: how come all the Al Brooks followers on elitetrader are poor while Al brooks is so rich?
Ffs. Just past chapter 1 (and a few random chapters partially). I'll wave to you once I pass $100 million.