Customer Reviews

Profit Strategies: Unlocking Trading Performance with Money Management

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

The information in the book is so vague that you learn nothing about the topics. The book seems to be more of an advertisement for websites, sofware etc. A short and useless read.

The content of this book is useless. You can find this information in Stock and Commodities or Futures

Do not waste your time reading this book. You can find this kind of information on the internet !