I recently finished "How I Trade for a Living" by Gary Smith. Couple of questions: 1. Does anyone know how Smith has done in the recent bear market? In his book he always goes long and doesn't like to go short. 2. Has anyone codified any of his techniques? He talks a lot about them when he describes specific trades but doesn't get into specifics. Does anyone trade based on his methods?
By the way, the Gary Smith mentioned above is not the same Gary B. Smith who trades strictly using TA and writes a regular column for realmoney.com. Also, Gary Smith if I remember correctly, solely trades mutual funds, where Gary B. Smith solely trades stocks.
Gary Smith was a great guy who spent a lot of time exposing fraudulent system vendors. He was a consistently profitable trader who traded the index futures off the CNBC price ticker. He had Futures Truth backtest his system extensively and his book published all the results. He published years of account statements to back up his success. He seems to have dropped out of sight the past few years. As I recall his system was long only, or maybe had one short sell pattern.
By the article he said he was in cash before the carnage and made most of his income by junk bonds. Junk also suffered so he must have too. http://www.traders-talk.com/site/mb/show_topic.asp?curpage=1&id=6884&folderid=1
As far as I know he wrote new book last year published by wiley and sons with one of those colorful (ugly) covers. It was titled something about electronic trading. I lent it to my brother so I can not give you the exact title. It was a fairly good book (it had almost nothing to do with electronic trading) explaining how he takes his short term trading profits and plows them into a mutual fund momentum or price persistency program. His timing techniques did seem useful. It was similar to the O'Neil and trading markets guys theories about big thrust days and follow through days. I did not enjoy the book as much as his first one, but it was good to see the followup. I believe 3 or four months ago either "active trader" or "stocks and commodites" interviewed him and some other traders about their success in the bear market. I believe he said he took a couple hits and went to cash and that all his profits for the year have come from interest. By the way I reserve the right to have him confused with Gary B. Smith, but I do think I got the above right.