Customer Reviews

Commitments of Traders : Strategies for Tracking the Market and Trading Profitably

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

First, my bottom line conclusion - If you're looking for a COT book, "Trading Stocks & Commodities With the Insiders" by Larry Williams will offer you much more in the way of implementable trading strategies/set ups than this Upperman book.

While this author goes to great lengths to descibe the underlying theories to his COT-based trading strategies (which he calls IMPA), there is precious little actual detail about his methods. Everything seems to be "my proprietary" this and "my proprietary" that. The author does not seem to understand that once his ideas are in the marketplace, others will not be able to implement them in the exact same way he did. For example, Tom Demark published TD Sequential years ago and it still works highly effectively. Why not let people into your Black Box, Floyd?

That being said, by looking at the charts and probability distributions, it may be possible to reverse engineer something similar to what the author does, but you will find yourself committing much time and effort to the project.

This author has copied Larry Williams approach to the Market ( he does give credit to Williams for introducing him to the COT ) all he has done is introduced fancy terminology and statistics to separate himself from Williams methods, even his entries and exit are very similar to Williams did many years ago.
The graphs in the book are extremely hard to read and are nearly impossible to relate to what he is trying to explain and what is the purpose of introducing proprietary methods if you can not do it yourself-the basic message then is join my site to get the full benefit of this book otherwise you will come away with a whole lot of fancy terminology and nothing else.
The terminology he uses is unbelievable- as one previous reviewer has already noted - eg Individual market participant analysis- why not just "COT report" everyone knows the who the players are- I could go on but wont waste time
The money management system is one of the worst around - I say this having read all Ralph Vince and Ryan Jones books and running the numbers myself personally.
I also find that the 4 and 5 star critiques comments seemed to be based on either a friendship with the author or belong to his web site - there is no critical analysis of the book showing why it deserves that rating eg Ed W comments that about the unique characteristics of each market- where does this system solve the problem and why must someone be rewarded by having the public pay money for a book (an expensive one) that contains secret formulas not available to them -very illogical.
Finally there are a lot of sites with simple and good analysis of the COT reports and Williams's book is better value for money.

This book was definitely written to punt his web site which I was a member until recently. He has taken the COT data - basically quite simple as shown in Larry Williams's book and tried to obscure this simplicity with his own terminology and fancy abbreviations such as IMPA.
On his web site everything is "proprietary" and his members worship him with praise and thank you's for every post he makes as if he has the holy grail of trading. He had 2 members who were very knowledgeable about the markets one from South America and the other from Africa (I think) but they are either gone or are just not posting anymore.
Back to the book- I have to make comparisons to his web site unfortunately as he writes the same in the book as does in his reports and his discussion site i.e. there is very little intellectual depth or rigorous analysis and discussion of the markets
And he tries to put everything in a language that say this is far too complicated for us mere mortals and that only he has the data that confirms his hypothesis-anything else that is offered is put down as "not according to his data".
His web site once had a notice that it was soon going to stop accepting new members due to the fact that only members would be able to use his "proprietary system" and that to larger a membership would make the system ineffective the same reason was given by him a couple of years ago on his discussion board on why he would not write a book- membership is still open, the book has been written and I do not think you will gain anything new that is not already known about the COT reports and trading.

This book discusses the authors trading system based on COT and price patterns. His work is innovative but difficult to follow at times. The author does do a good job explaining his methods for using the COT with six sigma statistics, but he does not reveal all the math behind his indicators. I have to say the technical indicators, particularly his seasonal cot indicators are very innovative, but again I wish he provided more in terms of the formulas and math behind his work.

Excellent for those that already know what the COT is and wish to learn how to use it more effectively.

Like too many others (DeMark, Summa, etc.), all he does is tell you that he has a magic set of indicators---but you need to purchase them on his website.

Save your money; I sent it back.

This book sucks. From the title and description, it should have an in-depth analysis of the Commitments of Traders report from the CFTC. As a self-professed engineer with a love of statistics (page 20), Upperman should have a great vantagepoint. Unfortunately, his engineering and analyses have major flaws.

Upperman either ignores or doesn't understand that successful engineering depends completely on physics. Without well-tested explanative hypotheses that describe how things work, engineers find it very difficult to put things together to fulfill design specs. Upperman skips building a corpus of well-tested hypotheses, and jumps into data mining. Having found some patterns that look profitable (methodology unstated), he back-tests them over arbitrary time ranges, and (surprise!) finds that they look profitable.

"Being right or wrong isn't the goal, the goal is to make money." (page 124)

Without a working model of financial engineering, Upperman finds himself making money on trades that he can't explain, i.e. trading by gut. Further evidence of his muddled thinking lies in his broken conception of risk management, summarized by the dictum "never allocate more than 10% of capital to any one trade" (page 192). This ignores covariance between positions, i.e. being long equities in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Korea puts 50% of your equity at risk of being zeroed if something affects Asia (like the recent decline in equities).

Floyd Upperman and his editor, Kevin Commins, at John Wiley & Sons either do not know enough, or they knew better and published this text anyway simply because they guessed that enough people would be conned. Either way, they should be roundly censured.

Floyd Uppermans book has all that one would want. Practical overview of trading realitys, a system that tracks the forward indicators that measure money flow, practical timing devices which are technical in nature but not the run of the mill typical methods that all others use. Originality and a desire to teach the fundamentals, as well as a window into the advance methods of an expert trader make this a must buy for anyone interested in the art of trading. They should make a sixth star for this book.

As I read the reviews I saw about a 50/50 love hate ratio. I found myself wondering about those reviewers that compared this "far too complicated" book to Larry's "simple and just as good or better" one. If Mr. William's books are adequate to accomplish the goal we are all after, ie. becoming successful traders, then why did they find a need to buy this book in the first place.
The bottom line is this. Futures trading is tough. It requires every skill and insight and discipline that we can bring to bear in order to make it work. COT data is absolutely the most crucial data available to forcast long term market direction. Else why do the large players try to hide where they are headed with their trades? And it is not just the commercials, it is all the large players. If a small trader can see where the large ones are going, if he is astute, he won't be a small one for long. In "Committments of Traders", Mr. Upperman does what I am not able to do. He demonstrates his exceptional ability to analyze more data than I even know how to find. He does work that I have neither the time nor skills ... nor desire... to do.
Is the book expensive? A little. Is it a bit of a promo for his web site and additional services? I felt it was. Is there anything wrong with that? Not if it makes me a more successful trader...which it has, and I haven't yet used his website.
People who complain about paying $60-$80 (or even thousands of dollars) for insights and services that will help make them more successful traders don't need to be trading in the first place. In a venture that can net a gain or loss of 10 times that amount in less than a minute, the cost of the book or the website is a drop in a very large bucket.
In real life, I am a doctor. Were my college books expensive? I can't remember buying one as inexpensive as Floyd's. Were my classes expensive? The cost of about two classes would buy a year of website services. Was my education worth it? That doesn't even warrant an answer. Improving our lot in life is never cheap or easy. This book is adequately inexpensive and has definitely made my trading easier. If you want to trade successfully, this book will help. Even if you never go any farther with Mr. Upperman than to read this book, you will have a greater understanding of the markets and how the different players make them work.
You get what you pay for...and to my mind, I got more than I paid for.

Don't bother wasting your hard-earned money on this blatant advertisement. Even if any of the stuff he says works, you couldn't use it to trade unless you want to invest $1,000 to sign up to his totally proprietary website. Just another author making money selling his ideas, instead of making money following them.

As other reviewers have said, this book is "proprietary" in nature and close to useless for serious study of the COT data. As a student of this data for over 20 years I always look for any additional insight from authors. One would be best served buying the Steve Briese or Larry Williams book.