Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom [Hardcover]

Van K. Tharp (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0070647623 | ISBN-13: 978-0070647626 | Publication Date: December 1, 1998 | Edition: 1

Your own strengths, style, and personality­­and the steps found in this book­­can revitalize your trading program!

"Van's book gets directly to the heart of what it takes to be a successful trader. It's the best book I've read on trading successfully; not fluff or hype like so many others."­­Tom Basso, President, Trendstat Capital Management, Inc.

"The trading public owes Dr. Tharp a debt of gratitude for this insightful masterpiece." -Edward Dobson, President, Traders Press, Inc.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The book is clearly written and makes generous use of practical examples and models...The principles he [Tharp] promotes for traders, if followed closely, can be applied to a wide group of investors." (Ticker Magazine )

From the Back Cover

Your own strengths, style, and personality­­and the steps found in this book­­can revitalize your trading program!

Praise for Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom:

"While I can't promise you financial freedom, I can promise you a book filled with sound trading advice and lots of ideas you can use to develop your own trading methodology. And, if you don't think that's enough, then you really need this book."­­Jack Schwager, author of Market Wizards and The New Market Wizards

"Van's book gets directly to the heart of what it takes to be a successful trader. It's the best book I've read on trading successfully; not fluff or hype like so many others."­­Tom Basso, President, Trendstat Capital Management, Inc.

"I've read hundreds of books about trading and this is one of the three best EVER WRITTEN. It's straightforward and to the point. Van clearly cuts through the appeal to wishful thinking, instead stressing psychological preparedness, expectancy, and money management. Moreover, he shows clear methods, with simple entry techniques, to push your equity to the moon. It's a great book!"­­Rolf Sigrist, President, Sigrist AG

"Van Tharp's new book...[is] full of new ideas and approaches to developing an individualized trading system; it teaches the principles that are necessary to make you a great trader. The trading public owes Dr. Tharp a debt of gratitude for this insightful masterpiece." -Edward Dobson, President, Traders Press, Inc.

Van Tharp "...cuts right to the essence of professional trading: how to develop winning attitudes and approaches; how to forget trading for accuracy and trade for expectancy; how to master position sizing. If you intend to trade, you'd better know what's in this book."­­Ed Seykota, professional trader

(19990617)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (December 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070647623
• ISBN-13: 978-0070647626
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (182 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In the unique arena of professional trading coaches and consultants, Van K. Tharp stands out as an international leader in the industry. Helping others become the best trader or investor that they can be has been Tharp's mission since 1982. Dr. Tharp offers unique learning strategies, and his techniques for producing great traders are some of the most effective in the field. Over the years Tharp has helped people overcome problems in areas of system development and trading psychology, and success related issues such as self-sabotage. He is the founder and president of the Van Tharp Institute, dedicated to offering high quality education products and services for traders and investors around the globe.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

335 of 375 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ProTrader, February 8, 2006

By 

ProTrader (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (Hardcover)

Out of kindness I have chosen to rate this a two-star publication. There are a few, very few, useful statements here for traders.

What else would one expect from a person that does not trade? Merely talking with successful traders does not imbue one with trading wisdom.

Like all of Tharp's work, from what I have seen, the title belies the content. That is, little to no worthwhile content, but a captivating title. Anyone that honestly believes themselves to be credible enough to write a trading book that can deliver "Financial Freedom" that has never traded professionally should not be believed. It would be similar to seeking advice from a homeless person about becoming a billionaire.

Another credibility issue for me with this author is that he is now hawking "No Money Down" and "Get Rich in Real Estate" tapes, books, seminars, etc. I would speculate that Tharp would sell widgets, or, at a minimum, books about widgets, if he believed there was money to be made.

I find it impossible to believe this person could ever be a credible source of information about trading! His trading resume consists of ..., well nothing, except the idea of how to make money by writing words on a subject he knows nothing about.

Many more useful, credible books exist that will help in attaining real financial freedom. Brett Steenbarger is a trader and has produced good material on the psychology of trading, and Mark Douglas, even though he does not trade, has produced more interesting and valuable books.

The most useful advice, read books about trading that are written by traders, and read reviews written by people who trade every day.

106 of 116 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Best of breed, but not a very good breed!, January 22, 2006

By 

Leon Story "amateur" (North Reading, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (Hardcover)

Dr. Tharp's book is head and shoulders above most popular investment books, and I heartily recommend it to anyone who is not a professional trader but is interested in managing his or her own investments at the level of individual stocks, bonds, options or futures. Why then only a three-star rating? I explain below.

The first three chapters, on individual psychology and biases, is non-technical but essential. The middle chapters, especially Chapter 5 which contains introductions to various styles of trading (supplied by various professional traders), are moderately informative and quite entertaining. The third part, the core of the book, primarily on money management and exits but with sections on setups and entries, is as good as you're likely to find in the popular literature of the subject. All the same, this is a maddening book with all the vices of its type Some examples:

. The cute metaphors and examples ("Holy Grail", "Snow Fight", "Marble Game") are are well chosen and probably motivate some readers. They are not mere filler. But they are elaborated at the expense of more precise information on the statistics of posiion sizing, the testing of trading systems, and so on.

. The much-vaunted "expectancy" turns out to be nothing but the ordinary mathematical expectation of probability theory, applied to the result of a trade or series of trades. The use of a coined meaning for an uncommon word may prevent some readers from finding further information in the general statistical literature. The discussion of this concept in Chapter 6 is just imprecise enough, and the examples in Chapter 12, trivial enough that the reader may be encouraged to purchase Dr. Tharpe's home-study course or take one of his seminars in search of clarification. Why do I think this is probably intentional? Because it is typical of the whole genre! On the positive side, the book is not riddled with advertising---something I can't say for most introductions to trading.

. The essentially mathematical and statistical nature of position sizing is watered down to an unconscionable extent, and what's there is presented with great fuss and fury but in a shallow and confusing manner. My seventh-grade teacher would have hit me with a ruler if I'd used the expression "divided into" (despite its retention in the COBOL programming language---presumably to cater to business programmers with sixth-grade educations).

. It's unconscionable that a a book which emphasizes risk management and position sizing should contain no reference at all to the most frequently encountered derived statistics. Not even the Kelly formula nor the Sharpe ratio are mentioned. But these require first-year high school algebra and a tiny bit of knowledge of statistics (means and standard deviations).

. The book contains no verifiable results of the statistical modeling of any of the described trading or sizing system components. Indeed, for the most part the descriptions are so broadly drawn that no such evidence would be possible.

. At least there's a decent bibliography, which includes Ralph Vince's books. These contain some of the statistical details. But I don't see a standard text on investments such as Bodie or Sharpe listed. Again, it seems to assume that the prospective trader is a sixth-grader, certainly not a candidate for business school, or even for the trading floor.

. This is a McGraw-Hill book, not the product of a "vanity" (or greed?) financial publisher. Yet there are dozens of editing errors. It appears to have been proofread for style and sentence structure, but by someone completely ignorant of the subject matter. P.184: "...O'Neil's criterion being an increase of 70 percent..." (where all three versions of O'Neil's CAN-SLIM method give 20%). P.185: "A stock in the top 75 to 80 percent would probably be one to consider..." (here the author---or proofreader---seems to invert "20 to 25 percent"). See also the inversion of "winners" and "losers" on p.148. There are too many instances of this sort of reversal to list in a review. Would I trust this man with my money? It's doubtful. The frequency of spelling errors is also rather high for a professionally-produced book.

But I repeat: This is absolutely the best popular book on trading of the half dozen that I've selected and read. It deserves most of the plaudits given it in other reviews. Traders would do well to peruse it. I hope they will also be cognizant of its limitations.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Even with its flaws, it's the best best best, May 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom (Hardcover)

What makes this book so good? It tells you how to build a real trading system. In the process, it exposes the prejudices and assumptions that cause people to lose money. For example: most people think that successful trading is a matter of picking the right stocks. Believe it or not, this belief sets you up to fail. Before reading this book you would probably rank as most important: (1) knowing when to get into the market; followed by (2) knowing when to get out of the market; (3) knowing how many shares or contracts to buy/sell; (4) understanding the psychological factors involved. The book makes a strong case that this ranking is exactly backwards! In other words, when it comes to trading it reverses your entire worldview. (It certainly reversed mine.) Some of these ideas are common, but Tharp tells you *what* and *how* to do. Not on the level of "here's a great trading system," but on the level of "here's how you *make* a trading system", oh and by the way, here's why you *need* to make your own system." That's a huge, huge difference, and other books on the subject are shallow by comparison.

The book does have problems. The writing and organization are uneven. Many passages are magnificent, others are cluttered or confused. Tharp is not a very good technical writer; technical details appear to be his weakness in general. Nor is he a good judge of others' writing (the worst parts of the book, especially the gobbledygook on neural networks, were written by other people). All of Tharp's writing that I have read suffers from poor editing. A first-class editor would have turned his first-class material into a first-class book. Instead, what we have is third-rate editing and first-class material yielding a second-rate book. It's a crying shame. However, the book still deserves more than 5 stars. Tharp shines at explaining the key concepts behind successful trading -- and this is the area that matters most -- and at this he is the best.