Which trading book should I get?

I think its selling pretty well, at least according to the publisher. Also, for some reason some publisher was interested in purchasing the Japanese rights.

 

I think it selling pretty well, at least according to the publisher.

 

flip a coin. then do same L or S

 

Technical analysis of the financial markets & Technical analysis explained 4 th edition.

 

"The Master Swing Trader" Alan Farley
lots of discussion leading up to the 7 Bells....one of which has become my bread and butter setup, affording excellent risk/reward parameters


"Streetsmarts" Connors and Raschke
interesting discussion of some classical trading setups...the "dialogue" between them at the end of some chapters is worthwhile, as is the rationale in some of the setups..
includes some back-testing results across different markets


not newbie books

 

Hi again,

Congratulations. Why should I buy it? What's new?

 

Here's the recent review by Don Luskin:

SUCCESS IN INVESTING isn't just about what you do — it's also about what you don't do. It's about getting it right, but it's also about not getting it wrong. Here are two investment books — one brimming with ideas for how to make money with advanced professional trading techniques, and the other a tragic lesson in how to destroy yourself with the worst mistakes an amateur can make.

First the good stuff. "Trade Like a Hedge Fund" is to investing what Julia Child's "The Art of French Cooking" is to cuisine — an encyclopedic guide to a repertoire of complex professional techniques, systematically laid out so that any reasonably diligent reader can follow the recipes. Our master chef is hedge-fund manager (and my market punditry competitor) James Altucher.

This is not the usual tedious compendium of self-aggrandizing war stories by someone who wants you to know just how smart he is (and how stupid you are). This really is a cookbook, each chapter devoted to a trading recipe tested in the author's kitchen.

For example, Altucher starts his book with a chapter on how to trade "gaps" — when a stock opens for trading sharply higher or lower than it had closed the day before. He calls this basic play a hedge-fund manager's "bread and butter trade" (as though anticipating my culinary metaphors).

He offers no fewer than six distinct strategies for playing gaps — complete with detailed and rigorous simulations of performance. Simply "fading" gaps (buying on down openings, and selling either when the stock recovers or at the close on the same day), wins 63% of the time, but the average result after factoring in gains from winning trades and losses from losing ones is a profit of less than 1% (don't bother). Can we improve on that?

Try it where you trade only when the stock had been down the day before; slightly better. How about when the gap is at least 5%? That moves the average profit to almost 2%. Now do it only when the whole market opens lower; slightly better still. Try playing it from the short side instead; nope, it gets worse. Try it where you hold the position overnight and hold it until it trades lower than the close on the day you bought it. Voila: average profit of almost 4% — a viable trading strategy.

Too intense for you? Well, the book is called "Trade Like a Hedge Fund." It's not called "Buy and Hold Like a Bank Trust Department."

Now, on to the bad stuff. If "American Sucker" by David Denby were a cookbook, it would consist exclusively of recipes for how to poison oneself.

Denby isn't an investment pro — he's the movie critic for The New Yorker. His book is a memoir of how he — like probably many other investors — lost a substantial portion of his net worth investing in technology stocks following the market top in March 2000.

Unlike many investors, Denby wasn't just excessively hopeful, or greedy, or naïve, or even just plain wrong. Instead, in the midst of a painful divorce, Denby was so obsessively focused on his own inner life that he barely seems to have engaged his mind in the investment process at all. If anything, it seems to have been a kind of play-therapy for him, and a perfect example of that old maxim: "Wall Street is a very expensive place to find out who you are."

As a critic for a respected magazine, Denby had social entrée into relationships that could have made him a better-than-usual investor. In the book we hear about how he met with Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt, how he lunched with superstar Internet analyst Henry Blodgett and how he attended parties at the home of controversial ImClone (IMCL) Chief Executive Sam Waksal.

But those were all missed opportunities for Denby. It's as though those people weren't even there — Denby has absolutely nothing to say about them, other than how his encounters with these extraordinary men affected his own emotional state. Reading "American Sucker" is like talking to a boor at a party who says, "But enough about me. Let's talk about you. What do you think of me?"

The thing I have always loved most about investing is precisely how little it has to do with me. An effective investor has to study literally everything in the world — because everything in the world affects the market. Nothing is out of bounds, except one thing: oneself. One's emotions, biases, hopes, fears — these things are irrelevant, and to the extent that one regards them at all except to extinguish them, they are enemies.

The role of yourself in investing is the development of skills and knowledge, and to that end books like Althucher's are both useful and inspiring. Even if his active trading techniques fit your style, you can benefit by emulating the clear-headed hard-working approach he brings to investing.

Maybe after reading Altucher's book you'll start thinking about your own trading and investing more like he does. Maybe you'll ask yourself, "That trade I just made — if I were writing a book like Altucher's, how would I explain it? Could I explain it at all? Did it really make sense?"

And the next time you make a mistake in investing, perhaps you'll learn to ask yourself, "What was I thinking?" And you will, of course, make lots of mistakes. We all do. But if you learn to ask yourself "what was I thinking," at least you can be sure you were thinking.

Hopefully you were thinking about the markets, and not yourself.

 

Thank you, James.

 

what!? the turtles were all about money management, you can't leave that out and discuss turtles in a meaningful fashion.

oy...

 

with all due respect, this is irresponsible advice to give beginning traders - and who else would need such a book? - unless they are also given a rock solid money management techniques. without that, such a strategy is market suicide.