Profitable Grain Trading [Hardcover]

Ralph Ainsworth (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 093438004X | ISBN-13: 978-0934380041 | Publication Date: October 1991

A classic on grain trading, this book is a virtual encyclopedia on all facets involved. Contains many technical trading systems and much market wisdom. Among Ainsworth's proteges was Chester Keltner, still one of the best-known grain fundamental analysists in the country.

Just as other trading books from the era offer, Ainsworth gives a straight forward commentary of his own trading experiences and ideas.

Ainsworth, basically a fundamentalist, provides mostly technical trading material. Some of the rules in the book apparently came from a contest in which Ainsworth offered $500 for the best trading rules submitted by his subscribers. One method, Year Around Trading Plan in wheat and corn, increased a $30,000 account to more than $500,000 over 33 years, a return averaging $14,000 per year. He also gets into seasonal trends, short swing trading, the two-cent stop and many other rules that will interest traders.

Some of the material is out-of-date and price ranges today might make many of Ainsworth's strategies impractical, but any visit with an old master is a good trip, and this book is an excellent addition to any modern grain trader's shelf.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Traders Press (October 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 093438004X
• ISBN-13: 978-0934380041
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,636,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Trading wisdom and advice galore, May 22, 2004

By 

Vince Heiker "tachyonv" (Flower Mound, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Profitable Grain Trading (Hardcover)

An easy to read, enjoyable book, it offers interesting trading rules that can be adopted to trading any instruments - equities, commodities, futures - yes, even today.

For me, the book is intriguing because of its historical documentation of how far along the development of trading rules, with back testing, had advanced, by 1932-1933.

Some of the specific dollar values of the trading rules are no longer valid, but simply change those to reasonable variables.

Author writes about what we now call breakouts, reversals, congestion and channeling trading strategies, in clear English. He examines whether stop losses work or not. He demonstrates, for his day and age, that because of commissions back then, that scaling in losing trades was a great way to blow a trading account away. He presents tables and copies of trading receipts to demonstrate how well various rules worked back then. Considering that his research was all by hand up through 1932,
his efforts were amazing.

I bought and read the book, looking for clues as to what led Chester Keltner to create Keltner Channels. Ainsworth employed Keltner 1934-1938, after this book was written, to help test various trading rules submitted for Ainsworth's contests, and to help Ainsworth write his newsletter. I did find things in this book that could be forerunners to Keltner Channels.