Profit Strategies: Unlocking Trading Performance with Money Management [Paperback]

David Stendahl (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 15, 1999

Drawing on years of experience, Stendahl highlights the key elements for reducing risk and maximizing profits through portfolio management techniques. More than Just a guide to what size your next position should be, this booklet features ...- 3 simple evaluation methods to ensure consistent system performance - Using your portfolio to remove fear and greed from your system - Techniques to analyze risk/reward calculations - and improve your system - Combining systems to meet your trading objectives - Tips for matching your system to your level of capitalization - And many more methods for analyzing and improving your trading performance.Plus, examples, tables, charts, and a full resource guide to help you understand all the profit-packed concepts presented.

Product Details

• Paperback: 85 pages
• Publisher: Marketplace Books, Inc. (May 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1883272300
• ISBN-13: 978-1883272302
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,916,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short and sweet, worth the money., September 16, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Profit Strategies: Unlocking Trading Performance with Money Management (Paperback)

While this book is only about 80 pages, there's quite a bit of useful information for the begginning trader packed into these pages. While the focus of the book is on money management, the first half is spent in the description of developing a trading system, this so that the reader has a firm understanding of the system used as the example for the money management techniques discussed in the second half of the book. This first half however, has a number of "big picture" overviews of system design and testing strategies that I found to be very informative. The section on money management techniques was likewise informative in a "big picture" kind of way.

I would highly recommend this book to beginning traders who are looking into system design, and to anyone who wants a broad overview of money management techniques. Given its limited length, there's a whole lot of good information here. The Author has filled the limited pages quite effeciently with ideas. On the other hand, if you are already familiar with such techniques as Maximum Adverse Excursion, Maximum Favorable Excursion, Drawdown Support, Fixed Fraction, and Optimal F techniques, you won't find anything new here.

A couple of things to note:

The Author is affiliated(or at least appears to be), with RINA Systems, and relies on data analysis using tools developed by that company. You might consider this book to be a bit of a house organ for that company, but this is not at all blatant and does not detract at all from the materials presented.

I found the position sizing examples rather odd with abnormally large percentages allocated to individual trades in the examples. In fact, I rather expected this book to be primarilly devoted to position sizing, and this aspect of money management is only briefly touched on. Some would argue that position sizing is what money management is all about, this Authors definition howver covers such things as adding to existing positions, locating optimal stop points, etc.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth It's Weight in Gold!! ...., June 6, 2002

By 

Jim Geiger (Rochester Hills, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Profit Strategies: Unlocking Trading Performance with Money Management (Paperback)

I disagree with the dissenters!

I usually find these Amazon customer reviews useful, especially the dissenters who rate a book poorly. HOWEVER .... in this case, I think they are WAY off base on this little gem of a book. This book is worth it's weight in Gold, in my opinion.

David Stendahl, who used to be associated with RINA Systems (...), he's independent now, presents some of the most sophisticated, important .... yet little talked about, concepts in finance! --- specifically money management in a very straightforward, accessible manner.

So why the bad ratings? ..... because a) this is NOT easy material to apply (however David's book is an easy read), b) it requires some special tools (i.e. RINA Systems software which works with TradeStation (...) -- although the concepts can be understood without the software) and c) this topic is covered almost nowhere else (Ralph Vince has written three books on Optimal f and Ryan Jones book on Money Mgmt being exceptions).

I respect original thinking. Stendahl .... RINA Systems ... and a rare few others, like John Ehlers (MESA & Trading Market Cycles and Rocket Science For Traders) are original thinkers.

Give this book a chance ... do some research (RINA Systems .... MESA, etc.) ..... and you'll likely find an entirely new world open up before your eyes.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ample money management primer, pricey, December 8, 2005

By 

J. G. "J. G." (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Profit Strategies: Unlocking Trading Performance with Money Management (Paperback)

If you get this book for less than $10, it's worth it. There's some good information on building a trading system, the importance of fitting money management to your system, money management strategies, Maximum Adverse Excursion, Optimal f, and stop placement. I would have liked some more details on position sizing and position management, with potentially some more insight into how to place stops in accordance with an intrument's range and beta, but at 80 pages the scope of this book is understandably constrained.

Much of what's contained in this book is available freely on the web, although the examples were pretty good and justify most of the price. You can't (or at least I can't) build a fully functional MM strategy off what I got out of this book, but it's a start.

This is a good, simple compilation, but not quite worth the high premium asked by the publisher.