I was searching the 'net trying to find out something about Van Tharp's trading record, because I remember his son, Rob, claiming that he had started trading his own account. (Anyone have any info on this?) I didn't find anything about his trading record, but I came across this ad for his new book. I must say I'm pretty disappointed, as the whole thing sounds like A-grade snake oil. Check it out here I'm inclined to believe Tharpy isn't doing jack with his own trading if he has to resort to the above crap to make a buck.
He mentions - as one of his students - Dr. Steve Sjuggerud. Dr. Sjuggerud is associated with Agora, who are experts in marketing and send out such snake-oil-esque email hype offers as "Double Your Money In One Day", "Make 100,000% Trading Options", etc. You get the picture. So, I have to agree with your assessment.
I remember my disappointment while/after reading Van Tharp's second book. I liked Tharp's first book very much, but the second has lost the focus: How much memory for your computer, what is an ECN, which unbeatable chart setup ... and a short summary of the things already covered in the first book. My impression was that 5/6 of the book where written by Barton. Whom I have never heard of before and after (which may not mean much, though). So I will definitely spare my money on the third one. Especially after googling for "Sjuggerud"
yeah, RVT had some interesting things to say in his first book. Then again there's a bunch of stuff in it that is simply wrong and doesn't work during rigorous backtesting. I used to recommend his and Elder's books to newbies. However, these days, for a fraction of the price of all these books put together, I recommend Marcel Link's "High Probability Trading", and Douglas' "Trading In The Zone". I think I will give RVT's new book a miss...
I read VTs first book and his money management book and then skipped his next one after checking it out in Borders. I bought Douglas's book and skipped Marcel's after scanning it. Not bad but didn't add much for me. I have been a bit of a VT sceptic. Lots of hype and seemingly a lot of ego (some from his acolytes though) and not much extra content. What surprised me with VT was his peak performance course. A friend recently let me borrow his copy for a while and it really had material in it that I hadn't seen elsewhere. I have had trouble trading one of my strategies and the standard prescriptions that we see on this board and others didn't seem to help. Weird because its the lowest risk of three strategies I use by a factor of 10 but I just couldn't stop making mistakes. PPC starts with the psychology side of it but much much deeper than Douglas's book. It turns out that the primary issue was how I made the decisions to enter and exit these trades (the structure of the process). VTs course covered this in one of the 5 books and has "instantly" solved the problem. For anyone who is having problems that don't seem to respond to the "trade smaller" etc etc prescriptions I would recommend looking at the PPC course. It isn't cheap but it doesn't take many losing trades to reach the price :eek: