This is my first post here. I am keen to supplement my income with trading and am prepared to lose in the initial years. I saw some posts that Al Brooks' books are good for learning market price-action. Well, I tried to read them and find I am too "stupid" to understand the books. Not giving up yet. Can the elite traders here give me a head-start by sharing what are the important things they learn from Al Brooks in understandable English?
You're not too stupid at all. The most useful thing one can learn from an Al Brooks price action book is how important it is for a publisher to hire competent editors, rather than relying on an author to edit their own work.. Al Brook's books are probably the the best recommendation for Strunk and White's "The Elements of Style" that exists.
Had a discussion with Al when he was finishing the first book about whether to go with a major publisher or a smaller house. One of the trade off's being on one hand visibility, credibility and marketing clout. On the other hand a smaller house can more enthusiastic about it's readiness and release. Being down the roster at Wiley yielded very weak editorial support and as a result the book reads poorly. If you want to understand Al's ideas, I'm afraid you will just have to wade in and work through it.
I'm afraid I agree completely with both the posts above. As a great enthusiast of Al Brooks' work, and someone who admits freely that I might not even be making a living at all without it, I have to agree with both the sentiments above. They're not well written; the editing is awful (or absent); they're very well worth persisting with, but it's really hard work, and time-consuming; there just isn't a "short-cut summary" available or really produceable (but I don't blame you for asking).
of course Al has never supplied any evidence that he is a successful trader. He makes his money from the usual hopefuls..
He was successful enough as a trader to give up his very highly-paid job as an eye surgeon and ophthalmology professor in favour of working full-time as a home-based trader. It's true that he refuses to disclose his own trading account statements. I don't blame him and would do the same, on the grounds that they're private and irrelevant: unlike some "vendors", he doesn't claim to be teaching in his books a "simple system you can just follow and profit without doing a lot of work". Trading forums everywhere are full of long-established, independent members who don't seem to care about that, having benefitted so much from the books ourselves. I'm one of them. Skepticism about "vendors" is a good and healthy thing, in this industry, but whether Brooks chooses to disclose his own trading accounts or not, even whether he has any or not, fortunately for us, none of us ever has to pay back to anyone the money we've made by following his teaching.
I like Al Brooks a lot. He's a genuine, honest person; however, I do believe all trading educators should post their live trading account statistics.
I traded with Al before he became a public figure and have little doubt of his ability to trade profitably but whether he or anybody is or isn't bears little correlation as to our own prospects for success. You will not trade like him or anybody else, you will trade in your own unique fashion regardless from whom you studied. Al is a scientist and approaches price action from a rather left brain perspective. For a more right brain, broader perspective, his bar-to-bar analysis may prove to be too tedious. One has to know oneself and study those ideas which resonate. For a beginner or journeyman, it may take awhile to determine a technical direction. It will be different for everyone. If you like Al's approach to understanding price action, his counsel will be infinitely more valuable than a auditorium full of trolls.
If you like Al Brooks' basic philosophy but find his writing incomprehensible, try books by Bob Volman or "Mack" (who has an excellent youtube channel called PATs). Same concepts, but more concise.