Maybe you are stupid, I found his 1st book easy to read. It had many good points if you already know how to trade Price Action. How hard is it to visual a barb wire pattern and not trade it. He had charts, how hard is it to look at a chart and know what to trade? What the market does to those that don't understand PA.
Maybe. And possibly people like you are brilliant readers ho have no trouble reading gobbledigook. Let's allow for all possibilities.
Unless you're in a race with someone for shits and giggles, don't rush it. The books are dense for good reason and it's going to take a good long while to get through them if you decide to stick with it. What I found best was to just take a picture of the charts on my phone so I didn't have to keep jumping back & forth while studying, and then go sentence by sentence/bar by bar and think about what he's explaining. Keep trading while you're studying because as you keep losing you'll end up reading about why and get annoyed/have "ah ha" moments. He does eventually outline everything you should be doing as a beginner trader to make money (with best trades), but it's up to you to build out the actual strategy you decide to implement. Regarding that last part, sure you should probably keep it in sim...but I found the pain of losing real money best for breaking bad habits. YMMV. Also keep in mind I'm not a profitable trader yet with only a year under my belt (around 9 months studying Brooks), but I think the work was definitely worth it.
What little I read of his first book was replete with narrative fallacy and hindsight bias. Why do I think so? In part, because he acknowledged some setups based on his criteria on a chart but not others. I found him to be inconsistent in his recognition of his own criteria. I think time would be better spent learning price action by observing it rather than trying to decipher incomprehensible hieroglyphics. But to each his own.
That's an understandable view if you only review a small sample of the written work. When I first started the books I thought it was ridiculous that everything was a contradiction, how could everything be given some made-up probability value (based on what?), what the hell was a High 1 2 3 etc, and why does he keep saying this compact falling price is a wedge. In time I've found that no price behavior is perfectly consistent, most of the time the best setups are more likely than not to have follow-through but it's not guaranteed, and we have to learn from the past to anticipate the future. Close is close enough (unless it's not haha). By keeping an open mind and reviewing lots of his examples with hindsight (and tracking all of my many failures), I learned a lot about risk/position management, what to do when the most probable outcome doesn't pan out, how to trade the failure, and his reasoning around why price moves the way it does. Is he correct/accurate in those assumptions? Honestly, I don't really care because it helps wrap my around context and with testing I've found it to work/make money. I appreciate his obsessive attention to detail, but he's definitely not for everyone.
I'm actually surprised than anyone genuinely finds Brooks's books useful and that they profited in their trading as a direct result of anything Brooks. But if you did, then more power to you. I just can't imagine it being worth learning a new language (Brooks-speak) for whatever incremental value you can eke out of his telephone books or ~100 hours of home movies. But let's be clear about one thing. From what I recall, he only provides color commentary in his books rather than actual guidance. I view his "obsessive attention to detail" (your words) as a vehicle to justify any outcome or conclusion after the fact. I read that even in his trading chat rooms there is only color commentary rather than any actual trades. He's just a guy at the sidelines with a mic, commenting. Commenting on what happened and what might or might not happen. This is trading? Sure there is uncertainty in trading. But trading is taking a position in an environment of uncertainty. He has yet to publicly take one. To paraphrase: "Double bottom has formed, meaning that buyers on the doji candlestick are looking for long or short entries." So then, price is either going to go up or down? Well, no shit, Sherlock Brooks! __________ “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.” - Albert Einstein (or possibly E.F. Schumacher)
There is a lot of color commentary, but I don't think people read long enough to get to the guidance portion; Book 3 - Chapter 24: The Best Trades, putting it all together. Outlines everything. Regarding only commentary in his trading room, no idea. I haven't joined the chat room (nor do I plan to) and I didn't bother with the video course. Don't get me wrong, I don't think Brooks is an end all be all to trading and I'm sure people can make money an infinite amount of ways in the markets. Brooks style and price-action teaching resonated with me so I chose to pursue it. I'm moreso sharing here for the future beginners trying to figure out where to start, or if they should even bother with this guy, if they stumble across this thread.
I find it surprising on ET that every time there is discussion on Al Brooks there are numerous posts no how he is not a real trader etc. I am in touch with at least 5 traders from my country who follow just Al Brooks and have benefitted from his books. We chat almost everyday on social media platforms like telegram for sharing notes, current charts with comments etc. Reading his books certainly helped many of us improve our trading. From the perspective of Al Brooks' readers, these comments don't really matter or even bother us.