I have read all the books by Van Tharp and regret wasting the time and money i spent on them. Theres to many people masquerading as traders writing books. There is nothing in any of his books that leads me to believe that he could or ever has made a living by trading. Sincerely Sterling
There was another part of this thread I meant to start a discussion about. The book. There are quite a few things in there worth discussing. A business plan for trading R multiples Position Sizing Daily Routine Equipment Different Strategies Common Mistakes Daily Review Keys to Gain Control of Your trading. The reviews really don't matter. What WAS nice about the reviews is a lot of traders on this board are REAL traders and can give an opinion from experience. Anyone with some bit of intelligence can tell that the first few reviews are rigged. What would have been better was to give one bad review and then say why with examples. This is how to show what you mean when writing. I hate seeing SPAM though and feel like that is. Does it matter. No , not really this won't affect sales one way or another. I'd like to see honesty, why someone liked a book or disliked a book. TraderRX what's with getting all defensive? Was that you who wrote them? rtharp
tharp, Just curious, does your dad trade actively? I don't mean once a month or several times a year. That's investing. I'm talking about in the trenches, slugging it out, hand to hand combat, with frequency. That's trading.
Robert if this is any consolation at all - I am a recent purchaser of "Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom--[Hardcover] Tharp, Van K." on Amazon (used)
Trader RX You haven't really read the book by asking me that. One of the first few paragraphs Dr. Tharp is introduced as a swing trader. I also noticed " The only financial freedom that this book provides is in royalties to it's author." which was a part of reviews in question........ and above you mention royalities and why it's so bad Andrasdnm bought used. (which I just consider smart on his part.) Guess we found our author for the bad reviews. No wonder this means so much to you that you have to keep coming back to defend them. Also. what do you think means more to my father? A 5 million dollar contract with one of the other "Market Wizards" to help develop detailed trading business plans for his entire trading organization or $4.00?? First Trading is trading. I know guys who do quite well with longer term time frames. One problem to think about really short time frames it's hard to move serious size around without heavily moving the market. To compensate for this ----most funds will lengthen the time frame. They then have a stop that is away from the daily noise of the market. To adjust risk for such a far away stop they have to buy less shares. This is how big accounts are usually traded. It's that simple. Maybe a little bit of basic knowledge will prove my point about some of my training and such of stuff that has been drilled into my head. Want a huge clue how to out perform the market? I'll give you an easy example and paint some pictures. QCOM went up over 2000% in 99. How many funds do you know of that had a return of 2000%?? None, do you know why? If they owned a stock it was usually no more than 5% of their portfolio and usually a lot less. Most funds own less than 1% of any stock in a portfolio. There way of managing risk is to diversify. Stops aren't a common word for them. So they own a portion of stocks that went up and down in that fund. Funds/individuals owning less than 1% of your total portfolio and having a stock go 2000% will get you less than 20% return. The other part to consider was all of the other stocks in the portfolio. Quite a few went up. But quite a few went down also. Most mutual funds have such small positions compared to their account size that they have extremely far away mental stops. They are heavily diversified. The problem is they are watered down by doing this. This is why the majority of fund can't outperform the indexes. They also have commissions and expenses. Now if the market is constantly going higher what's the best way to play it. Buy strength, stocks breaking out of bases and making new 52 week highs. The stocks that are going to produce the biggest returns will have to keep retesting their highs over and over again. If you have stops and stop out of stocks that are underperforming the market and place that money with the stock that are overperforming the market you will have a bigger average of your portfolio after awhile in stocks that are out performing the market. You will then also own less of an average of stocks that are underperforming the market. That's what it takes. As a trader you want to own as large as possible % of securities that are outperforming the market while reducing the amount of your holdings that are underperforming the market. If you own a heavily deversified portfolio of everything than you will huge average all of the losers and winners and be heavily tied to the general market. Cut the losers while adding to the winners will allow you to outperform. The losers will either go sideways or maybe even down. They aren't the gems of the market. You want to overall own a bigger piece of the winners and a smaller piece of the losers. The market then flipped. Turn your charts upside down and play the short side. Short the weakest stocks. The stocks holding up and showing strength close out your shorts and add to the stocks that are still going down. This will allow you to outperform the market on the downside. Meanwhile we as individuals don't have the expenses funds charge. We also have the use of margin to use. This means if you are doing well and can buy even more of the top performing stocks. It's how quite a few of my father's students have outperformed the market for years. Quite a few do triple digit returns. The average trader does the exact opposite. They hold on to their loser while cutting winners rather quickly. This is a part of human psychology that is so hard to unlearn. This makes a trader own more of an average of stocks underperforming the market while owning less of an average of stocks outperforming the market. This is why most individuals fail. What is even worse is some individuals add to their losers even more. This allows them to own an even greater % of losers in the market. With that explanation I think I can leave the basics of trading alone. It really isn't that hard. This thread is supposed to be about a book and what is in it. There has to be a few traders here who have read it and can give us feedback or ask questions about something inside. rtharp
c'mon guys! it is so obvious that the same person wrote those reviews! I can't believe anyone needs convincing after you go to the page and read them About removing/keeping them: does it matter? I mean if someone is so dumb as to believe these contiguous reviews to be authentic ones then they don't deserve to read the book
Cesko Glad you asked. I have spent thousands of dollars on trading books over the last 4 years and out of all these books my favorites are: Trading With DiNapoli Levels by Joe DiNapoli. Dynamic Trading: Dynamic Concepts in Time,Price and Pattern Analysis by Robert Miner Advanced Trading Strategies by Laurence Connors When you read these books you can tell that these guys have actually done some trading. Anyone with a couple of freshmen year composition classes can write trash about how to trade. Take my word for it, my garbage cans are full. Sterling