Customer Reviews

The Electronic Day Trader: Successful Strategies for On-line Trading

5 star:		(55)
4 star:		(26)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

This book is essentially obsolete just three years after its publication. Stocks are now traded in decimals, and the spreads on heavily traded stocks are now almost nonexistent, sometimes being less than one cent a share. Consequently, you can forget about any of the strategies or information regarding "pocketing the spread", "getting between the spread", etc. With the proliferation of ECN trading, the influence of the market makers in a stock has been markedly reduced. In a stock that trades 80 million shares per day, a market maker with a 100,000 share block is not going to be able to move the stock significantly, and ECN trading can overwhelm his influence. Likewise, information gleaned from the Level II screen, while still useful if one knows what to look for, is no longer the Holy Grail. Also, day trading firms, like the authors' "Broadway Trading" are on the way to extinction, now that some big online brokers offer direct-access trades for less than a quarter of what day trading firms charge, as well as offering free Level II quotes and other information not available to the day trading firms.

While the book contains a few nuggets of trading info, it was not written in a logical, easy to follow manner. As has always been the case, aspiring traders need to study the markets intensely and develop their own trading techniques; they cannot expect that any book will teach them how to be successful in a field where very few people ever succeed.

Although the writers clearly understand the subject matter well, conveying the information in easy to understand language is sorely lacking throughout much of the book. It is difficult to figure out exactly who the authors intended the audience of this book to be, as some sections seem to be written only for highly knowledgeable and experienced traders, but other sections are down to earth and offer clear understandable concepts. Most of the book is not really for the novice.

Basically, I didn't get as much as I wanted from the book, but I know more than when I started reading it.

As a relative newcomer to trading, I find that The Electronic Day Trader does an excellent job of filling in a lot of holes in my understanding of who the players are and what the playing field looks like in the trading world, particularly the world of day trading. It was a quick read and also serves me well as a reference book for the stock market. This book emphasizes what I believe to be the most important lesson of successful trading: a strong commitment to money management principles. The best books on trading that I have read make a point of punctuating this point as a key to successful trading.

I recommend this book to anyone who needs a RULEBOOK to help learn what you need to know to trade. If anyone needs a good PLAYBOOK of successful trading strategies, take a look at Cooper's Hit and Run Trading. It stresses a lot of momentum based strategies that are laid out in a simple, step-by-step approach. These two books have made me a happy trading camper!

There are some good ideas that you can rescue from this book. Therefore I think you should buy it since you can make much more money and certainly recoup your small investment if you employ 2 o 3 good tips.

Any way, from my point of view a trader must always read as much as he can. There is simply no other way to prepare one self for this difficult yet incredibly rewarding activity, but to learn and put into practice as much ideas as you can, at least by paper trading first.

The are a lot of books on the subject, however many of them where written 2 o 4 years ago and that kind of makes them obsolete in this constantly changing field.

The internet offers great places where you can learn more specialized trading techniques. One of those places that I have found to be worthy is ProfitableStockmarket dotcom.

They focus mainly on momentum trading and employ a rather simple yet effective strategy. I think that for a trader to survive and be profitable, its neccessary to keep their trading as simple as possible. To much confussion and technical indicators will most of the time make you slow in your decisions and froze you up when a good opportunity is right in front of you.

In the end it's all about buying or selling with out hesitation, and doing it over an over again according to your set ups.

I am a statistics profressor and Day-Trader with over 200% return this year, no thanks to this author. My $25.00 spent on the book could have been $100 on the market, instead I gave the book to a friend as an example of a worthless book. No real information in this book that can't be found searching the Internet with key words "Day Trading". The software system used by the author costs about $1500 a month and he trades from a seat on NASDAQ with a multi-million dollar account. If you have less than $100,000 and want to day-trade, this book won't help you. It's for the big-leagues. Worthless a thousand times.

The cost-effectiveness of this book is very poor. What you get for a relatively high price, is a simple techno book, describing in a sometimes very confusing way technical details of day trading, but I seems very doubtful if it would be a useful guide when really entering day trading.

What I did miss in this book is a chapter (or two) dealing with the chances and risks of day trading. Ther is no indication what the average success rate is and what percentage of traders make how much money.

There are only two pages dealing with statistical calculations. The conclusion at that point is, that due to these statistical calculations you would be able to make 30% net gain per year. If this is all, I rather would buy GE stocks, take no risk, have a good sleep and after a year an even higher return!!

Since the auther runs a SOES company you get the impression, that the book is just a simple ad for the company, however to be paid by the reader for an unjustified price.

In summary: Forget about the book, buy GE stocks and have a good time.

They went bankrupt, which is where you would be if you followed West and Friedfertig's methods. The book was a copy of Jack Schwager's Market Wizards series, due to the interviews conducted with "traders". You would be amazed if you saw some of these people and didnt read their words in print. Somehow they would not come off so sharp. Trust me!

Also do you think our authors would be able to spot "managerial talent" over a few aspiring proprietory traders? No they hire guys who have previously filed bankruptcy in their past and pipe up their accomplishments, which are a joke when you realized they bailed on creditors!!

Save yourself a dime and avoid it-if someone gives it to you, and you can't return it, use to start the BBQ grill. I could go on and on about SEC/NASD violation, getting short on a downtick, etc but I wont!

This is a very interesting book and useful if combined with the Secrets of Electronic Day Trading also created by the same authors. We are not sure that the discussion regarding Specialists is still that useful because it is our understanding that specialists do a great deal more hedging with options than when one of these authors worked on the AMEX. However, with regard to listed stocks you get to see how a trader of New York stocks thinks. It is part of the evaluation process that we do all day long. This book's strength seems to be with NASDAQ stock trading. Which makes sense since the authors own a SOES firm. On CNBC the author stated a new trader should learn how to trade by trading 100 shares. We agree. You are not going to sit in front of a screen and be a great trader; without understanding, experience and discipline. After all did the net stocks go up forever? After Yahoo went up over 200 was it still a hold. I guess it depends on the size of your account and your time horizon. This book explains a very simple method of day trading. It surprisingly works for a few very skilled practitioners. We know it works because we do the same thing, (mostly on New York stocks). If you have experience you might pick up the nugget of wisdom in this book. Without experience you need to read the follow-up book because the useful piece of information gets drilled into you by every real daytrader they interviewed.

The Electroninc Day Trader didn't take the time to go over the basics of trading stocks. It used a lot of terms that the beginner would not understand. The book "Day Trade Online" by Christopher Farrell did a much better job in explaining in detail what terms meant and took you through the trading process step by step. I would give that book 5 stars!

This book contains good informaton, but horrible writing makes it difficult to understand. I would suggest reading another book on the subject before attempting to decipher this one.