Customer Reviews

Hit & Run Trading: The Short-Term Stock Traders Bible

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Save your money. If you want a much better book at a much cheaper price consider buying Dr. Alexander Elder's "Trading for a Living". Or you might try Stan Weinstein's classic "Secrets for Profiting in Bull and Bear Markets". I agree that Cooper's book is way overpriced for a book of such shoddy quality and miniscule content. Also most, of his so called "strategies" are nothing more than Japanese Candlestick patterns that have been around for hundreds of years. This guy is profiting handsomely by disguising Japanese Candlestick patterns as his own bar chart "trademarks", giving the patterns his own distinct names and then reselling them. Steve Nison's classic "Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques" does a better job for a better price. His other strategies such as "Expansion Breakouts" are nothing more than trading range breakouts that have been around forever and can be found in any other technical analysis book. There is nothing new here folks! The book would be a better deal at $10. His 5 Day Momentum Method is even a grander ripoff! Only suckers need apply.

I do not recommend this book. I went ahead and bought the book and read it. He claims it's the "trader's bible". He does provide ENTRY strategies as well as stops for these entries. He however, spends very little time saying anything useful about money management which is a very important aspect of any trading system. If this was not bad enough and you are smart enough to make your own money management scheme using his entries, you really can not do it, because he DOES NOT provide exit strategies! That is correct, he says it himself that his exits are completely discretionary (page 137). In any event, I went ahead and programmed all but two of this entry strategies (2 of them could not be done since they would require tick data and secondaries info to test them which I did not have - nor was I about to invest getting this data to test his strategies after seeing the bad results I got with the other entry strategies). Since he did not provide exit strategies, I tested several variations with each: exiting the next day at the open, exiting 2, 3, 4, 5 days after the signal. I also tested exiting randomly within the next 1 to 10 days. I did this testing to see if his entry strategies had any merit by themselves. I will not get into describing in detail the results for each. However I will say that NON of his entry strategies are worth investing in, because they make very little money if any at all. Those that did make some money made it when traded over MANY MANY trades (tested over 1500 stocks and averaged 4 trades a day). However, the statistical advantage was so little for winners that by the time you put some commission charge and some slippage (all his entries are stop based) you will definitively reduce the value of your account. Most likely you will just be feeding your brokerage house in the best case. In summary, the entry strategies I tested have no real trading benefit, he provides no money management scheme nor trade exit scheme - so it is not a trading system or strategy. He is really only selling useless entry signals. ... Using a absolute point value seems very "beginner" to me. If this guy is a professional trader and makes money, he is not using these entry signals unless his discretionary exit criteria makes up for his useless entries. I find that his entries are as useful as just entering randomly into the market place. Maybe his business is selling this expensive book to patsies such as myself. I hope you do not become the next one.

Although I agree with Mr. Cooper's stategies, I would not recommend this as an initial book for someone looking for short-term trading strategies. The first few chapters are going to appear "greek" to someone who does not understand ADX or DI strategies since they are not explained.

A MUCH better recommendation would be "Street Smarts, High Probabilty Short Term Trading Strategies" by Laurence A Connors and Linda B Raschke. It costs a little bit more ($122.50 thru Amazon) but well worth it since it offers a bit more detail and better hand-holding for a beginner. They are obviously business associates since their trading strategies fall under the same names and Jeff Cooper had referred to Larry Connors in this book.

In "Street Smarts", there were also better examples of how they manipulated the software to conform to their strategies and the type of software packages they recommended!

"Hit and Run" would be a good follow-up and offer slightly new insights to the book "Street Smarts" once you understood the "lingo". But probably, overall not worth the money since there were many more "Street Smart" strategies that could be used and were better explained by Connors and Raschke.

I was very disappointed after reading this book and checking out the numerous strategies listed in it! All of the strategies performed bad(except one)! I checked this because I bought the software module for it which shows buy and sell signals on charts in my metastock charting software. I checked all of the buy&sell signals generated from all the strategies in this book and most of them were false signals! Sure some of the strategies performed better than the others, but in general all performed bad! I was not looking for the "Holy Grail", but was expecting some better performance from these strategies! I HAVE SEEN some good trading strategies/systems after reading this book that are really impressive and outperform ones listed in this book! There is one exception to all this Jeff's "Stepping in Front of Size Strategy". This is really an IMPRESSIVE and VERY SMART strategy! This in the only one that I have not tested myself, but am very optimistic about the results, since logically it seems that it will work. In conclusion, this book was a MAJOR disappointment and I don't recommend it!

Don't listen to these BS reviews, I tested his methods on historical data, and they simply lose money. This book is one of the biggest ripoffs I ever fell for in my whole life. I would give negative stars if I could.I hope Amazon publishes this to protect their customers

I look at all the five star reviews of this book and just shake my head. Much of this slim, overpriced volume consists of "methods" that have the same reliability as a coin flip. One of the chapters is nothing more than a description of a very simple candlestick indicator. The author calls it a "lizard" but in candlestick charting it's known as either a shooting star or a hammer. Some of the techniques described demonstrate a worthwhile approach to combining indicators. But, that said, one of the hallmarks of the publisher of this book is high-priced volumes that are not proofread for awkward writing and poor syntax. That problem combined with some of the flimsy methodology in this book add up to questionable value for the money. At 100 bucks a pop the beginning or intermediate trader would do much better picking up either or both of Steve Nison's books on candlestick charting.

When the book arrived and I saw that it was only 150 pages - with many of those pages consisting of charts, I wondered if it was worth $100. After finishing it two days later I would have gladly paid three times that amount. As a successful trader Mr. Cooper is straight and to the point using actual experience and very little theory. He doesn't waste your time. In fact, I immediately ordered his second book 'The 5 Day Momentum Method' and spent the next weekend entering all of his indicators into the Metastock Explorer. You really do need a computer to take full advantage of these trading strategies. Now, every evening Metastock automatically scans my stock database for the signals (a great time saver) and of my first four trades using this system, three were successful, including two short sales which I had never before attempted. If short term trading interests you, I would heartily recommend starting with this book.

Do any of these strategies work? Not in my experience. Sure you get an occasional day here or there where they perform well, but for the most part if you back test you won't find anything here. It may be possible to filter these trades, but so far no one has stepped forward to tell you how. Certainly not Jeff Cooper in this book. For the person who has lost only a point per trade with the success ratio that I've found that would bankrupt you fairly quickly. The book may have some value as a stimulus to thinking. These patterns may have worked once. As with anything good you need to find your own patterns and do your own work. The book is not worth it's price. It should be discounted. Even Schwab has lower comissions now than the price of this book.

This book contains a few types of trading setups. Some seem to be renamed candlestick patters and some are just plain good old setups for buying momentum stocks. We have purchased the software and at times reviewed the results in a somewhat limited manner. Our overall feel for this style of trading is that it could work with proper money management and proper filtering. In fact it has to work with proper filtering in an up market because experience tells us that trends experience pull backs and this books contains setups that will get you in to potentially large moves. Perhaps a filter looking for accumulation in the NASDAQ 100 or the S&P 500 would bring solid returns. One caveat, in general, the downside setups seem to have you selling right into the area where professionals love to stuff shorts. Really back test your sell setups. A good book for a person trying to figure out what professionals are thinking.

I have read a few trading books in my short career and found Cooper's book the most useful. It was short and sweet and I was able to pick up the concepts fairly quickly. All his strategies made sense to me and I am able to find winners about 60% of the time with these strategies. I don't think that absolute beginners or investors will benefit from this but traders who know how to find the ADX and the +DI/-DI (that took me the longest time to figure out but it really was easier than I thought, most trading analysis programs carry it as a standard feature). Computer literacy is a must to successfully use these strategies. If you don't know much about technical analysis, I recommend the Encyclopedia of Chart Patterns or Getting Started in Technical Analysis before reading this book. You may also want to check out AIQ's TradingExpert Software. Their manual is very clear with the explanations of the different technical indicators.