Customer Reviews

How Markets Really Work: A Quantitative Guide to Stock Market Behavior

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This one is BY FAR the biggest waste of money of them all. This guy basically presents ONE idea in the whopping 145 pages, of which 75, yes SEVENTY FIVE are graphs that show, literally 2 bars or 2 lines. This is absolutely not an exaggeration. 75 of the 145 8.5" by 11" pages have ONE graph with 2 bars showing a comparison of, for example, how the S&P 500 performed after 2 consecutive down days over the next week vs 2 consecutive up days. That's it. Nothing else. 18 pages are tables of numbers that, if you've read one of them, you've read them all. This leaves 53 other pages, of which 11 are COMPLETELY BLANK!! Of the 42 remaining pages, maybe 10 of them have more than 2 paragraphs and fill more than 2/3rds of the page. This book is a complete sham. I highly recommend Amazon pull it. I will be calling Amazon to return this book immediately for a full refund.

This book is a quick argument for short-term contrarian trading in the stock market, backed by a zillion pages of data (that nobody is going to do more than flip through and glance at a page here and there). It does makes a good argument, however.

To follow the conclusion in your own trading you will be buying after the market sells off and selling after it rallies. I actually developed and published a simple system based on these principles using Bollinger Bands and betting on reversals when price hits the outer band and stalls the next day (without bursting through it). It works well most of the time, especially in non-trending markets.

The problem with the book is it's failure to follow through with any suggestions for rule-based systems based on it's conclusion. OK, bet on reversals - when do you place a trade? While the market is still moving or after it stalls? How much of a move does it need to be before entering a position? Is it applicable to all time frames? When do you take profits?

Markets move and then correct in waves 95% of the time. Marcel Link concludes in his excellent book "High Probability Trading" that betting on the smaller-wave corrections just isn't worth it in the long run and you are better off betting on waves in the direction of the bigger trend. I tend to agree.

This book is way, way, waaayyyy overpriced for what it is. That being said, it is the best 1-star book I have read.

For me, books are either a 1 star, 3 star, or 5 star. The 5-stars are the classics that are too good to ever remove from your bookshelf, like many of the books I recommend at winningfinancialstrategies.com. The 3-stars get sold on ebay when the bookshelf overflows. The 1-stars go to Salvation Army.

If you've ever watched a perfect looking breakout fall apart before your very eyes, you know that they don't always work. I know I've done it many times and I know a lot of traders who do, too. And I've sold when the market looks really bad, only to witness a sharp rally stop me out.

These are two examples of trades I won't be taking any more (under certain conditions) now that I've read this book. There was obviously a lot of research done for this book, which covers various market scenarios and what the market does in the short-term. There is a lot of what you might call "conventional wisdom" that is dispelled in this book.

There are no trading strategies in this book; it is more of a refence manual for the market and what it is likely to do given certain conditions. Whereas the Stock Trader's Almanac breaks down days of the year and gives you the probabilities of the market going up, How Markets Really Work breaks down various market conditions and quantifies market behavior.

Mine is already marked up (no dog ears yet, but give it time) and it's sitting on my desk for easy reference.

I've been trading for 2years. I know absolutely everything suggested or allegedly discovered in this book.

Main idea is to buy the stock which has been down for a few days, and don't buy the stock which has been up for a few days because that is what the statistics says.

And more annoying is that author continually insists the method above is counter intuitive. But is it?? IS IT??

Nothing considerable. Tatal waste of money. I am really frustrated and angry that I bought this book so encouraged by other reviewers.

Folks trashing this book are simply wrong! This is an important book for traders; it is not for investors. There are droves of us traders out here who will benefit substantially from this work. That said, I must admit when I first opened the book I was thrown off, shocked to see what looked like very little information occupying large tracts of page space. I was concerned and a bit put off. My first impression was that I had wasted my money! Then I began to read and to study the charts and THE TABLES. Don't fail to study the tables and the simple figures in detail. As I did, the value of this book came home loud and clear. I had not wasted my money. I had spent it very wisely. This book enables the thoughtful and thorough to make real money. If you are in it just for a read, buy something else, maybe "Grimm's Fairy Tales."
If you already know all there is to know about the markets then trade, don't read. And please don't steer those of us who don't yet know it all away from a veritable treasure of solid,useful, valuable, no-nonsense information that can help us know enough to trade with an edge. I give this book to friends. I give it to them with confidence that it will not steer them into some kind of trading trap; rather, that it will help them learn some essential, foundation knowledge to trade with a better likelihood of profitability.
Thank you Larry Connors and Conor Sen for a work well done and well presented.

There are no opinions about how to trade. It's pure historical research. You can buy books that give opinions about which way a stock will move based on a pattern, or you can get this book, which tells you what the market actually does.

Research is expensive but presenting research without composition is worthless. Unfortunately this book presents valuable research without composition and it turns out that the content of this book is to be forgotten right after reading it.

all connors books are expensive, very expensive.

a $50 book for a 100 something pages which are all filled with graphs.

i wonder if authors like this can sleep peacefully every night without feeling guilty of ripping people off so much.

This book won't teach you how to fish in the seas of the market. Probably anybody who'd shell $50 for a book like this already has a good theoretical understanding of the dynamics of fishing, and is now onto more sophisticated and practical pusuits like trying to optimize when, where, how they hook their prey.

And if you're in that category, this book will probably meet your needs. For those who are too lazy or computer illiterate to run elaborate backtests themselves (count me into the latter category), messrs Connors and Sen have created a lean volume designed to counter prevailing Wall Street wisdom (that the only way to vast riches is in buying AFTER higher prices, good volume, and good breadth) and extrapolate upon some interesting, reliable setups that the reader can then build his own systems around.

The austerity of the book represents both its major strength and weakness. I would have liked some more analysis of drawdown and risk, but that would be more appropriate for a book on actual trading strategy, not a "data reference" like this. Also, the authors' used essentially the same exit date in each chapter and for each setup, eg, 1-day, 2-days, and 1 week. This is appropriate for many of the short-term traders who would read a book like this, but it would have been interesting if they'd incorporated a few more exit parameters. And lastly, I would have liked a bit more context in terms of where the market itself was on particular dates and during particular setups, but that also exceeded the bounds of this book.

Although "How Markets Work" is a bit pricey for what you get, it's still a good resource and well worth consulting.

I've been a Larry Connors fan since "Street Smarts" and his new book did not disappoint. He was able to quantify what some of the best traders probably already know. I have already put into practice several concepts from the book -- and with good results so far.