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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good Stuff, But Not Enough of it to Fill a Book, March 4, 2010
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In this book, former Turtle Curtis Faith takes a different approach from the trading systems orientation of his earlier Way of the Turtle. It's one that would seem to contradict his earlier focus on systems. After all, instinct and gut feel would seem to be the complete opposite of system trading. It's not really that simple, though.
At the core, Trading from Your Gut is about integrating the right-brain instincts and intuition you develop as a trader with the left-brain rational side from which systematic analysis and trading tends to flow. Faith spends a fair amount of time arguing for why that is important. In fact, the better part of the book could be said to fall into that area. The idea is that combining the two parts of your brain will make for much better results than either one on its own.
Now, having said that, Faith considers the swing trading timeframe the most optimal for trading with both sides of your brain. Real short-term trading, he contends, favors a more intuitive approach, while the timescales of long-term trade suit a more left-brain approach because there's plenty of time to think things through rationally. It's worth noting that an awful lot of traders seem to want to go the other way, make gut calls on long-term trades, but use mechanical systems for short-term trading.
If you're looking for short-cuts to develop intuition, though, you're out of luck. Faith tells you what you should already know - that you can only really do that by trading. That said, he does provide some tips for making the process more efficient and effective. There is, of course, a lot of trading psychology discussion in the book, which given the subject matter shouldn't come as a surprise. In fact, Van Tharp wrote the foreword.
As much as I do believe this is a worthwhile subject, I think Faith had to do a lot of stretching to get it to be a book. There is clearly a lot of filler at the end to get close to the 200 page count, including a discussion of the forex book he has in the works. I think when you boil down to the meat of what he's trying to get across you really only have a couple chapters. My personal feeling is that this material, at least as it is currently developed, would have been better off as a section on a more expansive book on trader development, or even trading systems.
My bottom line is that overall I came away a bit disappointed in a kind of "does not fulfill its potential" sort of way. I don't think this was Faith's best effort. It doesn't disuade me from wanting to see what is next book offers, though.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
This Material Is Dangerous, September 11, 2010
I am a currency trader and have a read a decent amount of trading books covering technical analysis, fundamental analysis, and market/trading psychology. This was a tough one to finish. Trading the way Faith suggests in this book is a foolish venture. The content is riddled with holes and the psychology behind what he is saying will not help you be a better trader. I do agree that any person experienced in their field has a certain intuition that runs in the background of their thinking, but this intuition is based on years of study of actual principles tested in real life situations. It's not based on guessing or a "feeling" as that sort of approach is detrimental to trading.
Trading is a skill, and a difficult skill to master. The odds are stacked against you, maybe more than any other professional field. The last thing you want to be doing is making "gut" decisions. A recent best selling book by Malcolm Gladwell, titled Blink, deals with these same concepts you find in Faith's book, and while Gladwell's book is entertaining to read it is not something you should apply to trading. The element of risk that exists in trading is often what lures us into the fight. In the middle of that fight the uncertainty that looms has to be distilled and managed in order to make a decision. The only way to do this is by applying a set of time tested methods coupled with much practice.
A friend of mine recently put a big chunk of money with a forex trader. After 2 trades that resulted in a 50% draw on the account capital he asked the account manager what the heck he was doing putting so much of the capital at risk, and when he questioned the manager about a current losing trade he was in the guy's response was "don't worry, it will turn around." That is the sort of thing that results from the mentality you find in Faith's book. It produces this type of approach to the markets and it ruins accounts.
If you are serious about trading, then steer clear from the material in this book. It's your money at stake.
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19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Learning to Grow and Trust Your Instincts, February 14, 2010
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
First what this book is not: Not a "how to" book on stock trading. Not a primer for beginning investors. Not a treatise on any particular trading style. Therefore, "Trading from Your Gut" is not by itself a sufficient source of training for becoming a stock trader. But these "nots" are what make Mr. Faith's book unique and valuable - there is no other book that provides the same very valuable perspective.
His basis thesis - it's right there in the subtitle - is that a stock trader needs to use both his analytical and his intuitive abilities. He emphasizes that with practice the human mind can recognize general patterns in graphs and data that are very difficult for a computer to discern. The ability to immediately "see" that a stock is bouncing off of a support line or that it is "rolling over" may be a very reliable indicator that it is time to buy or to sell, and it often can be obvious with little more than a glance. For a busy trader in a fast-moving market, this special ability of the "right brain" is invaluable.
So, if your are a serious stock trader, the value of the book is in supplementing whatever traiding methods you may be using. It will give you confidence to trust your visual impressions and gut instincts even when you may not have the analytical backup for your decision, and especially when the analytics and intuition line up.
The author is a good storyteller and offers illustrations from a wide varitey of fields. His depth of personal experience and history of successful trading lends credibility to his ideas. I recommend this book as a very worthy addition to any stock trader's collection. It brings into focus what all us traders have sensed - that sometimes we just seem to know what to do without pulling out the calculator. Mr. Faith explains that this is not mysticism, but just another output of an experienced stock trading brain.
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