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332 of 342 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Picks up where every other book leaves off, August 1, 2002
This review is from: Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude (Hardcover)
If you are like most people, after your first few losing trades you set about to learn better market analysis. After your next string of losers you learned about risk management. But there's still one more challenge to conquer; yourself. That is the major premise of this book. If it sounds like wishy-washy psycho-babble to you, I'll only say that I would have agreed -- four months ago, before I quit my 20-year technology career, obtained a Series/7 license and joined a professional day-trading firm. I now believe most people would lose money if you gave them 50/50 odds on whether or not it was going to rain tomorrow. In other words, successfully forecasting the market is not enough. Why not? Well, this book explains why not. It has to do with one's sense of self-worth, one's moral judgment of money, one's work-ethic, one's tendency to focus on good news while ignoring bad, and other things. "Zone" was recommended to a friend of mine by a professional floor trader who told him, "I wish I had read it before starting two years ago. Don't place another trade until you do." Well said. Does this apply to investors as well as traders? Oh, absolutely! If you have ever said to yourself, "I'm not selling that stock while it's down, I'll wait until I have a profit in it," then for the love of money, read this book. Finally, read "Zone" before Douglas' earlier work. If you still want more then read "Disciplined Trader" for a general review plus a deeper exploration into the author's philosophical and meta-physical theories.
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94 of 94 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Set up your mind before trading, November 17, 2004
This review is from: Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude (Hardcover)
If you want to fulfill your expectations of a perfect trading system this is not your book. This book is about you and the market; is about how to set up your mind to become a consistent winner.
Chapter 1 describes the necessary mental framework for trading properly.
Chapter 2 shows the psychological challenges a trader must face up to.
Chapters 3 to 5 define the mental framework for trading and what will happen if you lack it.
Chapters 6 and 7 tell us how to get that mental framework from a personal point of view ( opportunity flow and thinking in probabilities).
Chapters 8 to 10 describe how to achieve that mental framework from the market's point of view.
Chapter 11 is an exercise to put it all together.
Although Mr. Douglas knows what he's talking about, his book requires more market examples. Furthermore he loses the thread of his arguments at times and request to be reviewed several times to make the most of it.
In spite of this shortcomings it is correct a approach and worth reading.
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265 of 280 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
3 stars, should have been 5, April 8, 2006
This review is from: Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude (Hardcover)
Because the core of the book - the emphasis on 'thinking probabilistically', and on banishing both fear and euphoria: on the system rather than on individual trades - is excellent and worth the cover price alone.
However there is a wearying amount of padding - most of it in the 'obviousness' category. The author spends pages at a time, for example, telling us that:
1. We have beliefs
2. Those beliefs cause us to act certain ways
3. We can change those beliefs
4. Therefore causing us to act in different ways.
(etc etc etc)
We knew all this.
Chief problem is that Douglas isn't a writer: doesn't know how to pare and refine material; reduce to essence; delete the unnecessary. Likes the sound of his own voice.
This also shows in the frequent spelling and grammatical mistakes, and the poor punctuation - which tends to throw one's attention all over the page, trying to discern a meaning. I'd have hoped the publisher - Prentice Hall - could have afforded an editor.
Douglas also affects, at times, knowledge of things he knows nothing about. E.g. equating negative ions with negative emotions - i.e. an electrical charge with a metaphor (!) Even a bit of school science would have prevented this one.
Hard to know whether to recommend this book or not, as reading it will waste much of your time: as you proceed from gem to gem (and there are many) via a wilderness of excess, often meaningless, verbiage.
Advice to wealthy readers: Pay someone to rip out the time-wasting pages, and chapters, and salvage for you the worthwhile bits - most of them in the first half.
Advice to Prentice Hall: Employ editors; you'll find it cost-effective in the long run. For example, people will recommend more of your books to other people.
Advice to Mark Douglas: cut this book in half, or less.
John Macgregor
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