Winning the Day Trading Game: Lessons and Techniques from a Lifetime of Trading (Wiley Trading) (Hardcover)

by Thomas L. Busby (Author), Patsy Busby Dow (Contributor) "October 19, 1987. When the sun rose on that Monday morning, I felt financially secure..." (more)
Key Phrases: scheduled economic reports, trading clock, protective stop placement, Wall Street, United States, Dow Futures (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Take a proven approach to short-term trading.

Winning the Day Trading Game offers an insider's view of the trading life and provides proven strategies for profitable trading. Professional trader Tom Busby explains how the strategies that made him so much money early on in his career ultimately failed during the 1987 stock market crash and then reveals how he reinvented himself as a high-percentage day trader. He interweaves personal experiences with technical explanations to outline the cornerstones of his technique. In highlighting his own trading experiences, Busby clearly explains how to beat the market by balancing the impulses of greed and fear, managing risk at all times; and taking responsibility for your trading.

Thomas L. Busby (Mobile, AL) has been a professional trader and broker for 25 years, working with Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. He founded the Day Trading Institute in 1996 and it has grown into one of the most successful trading schools in the world.

From the Inside Flap
After great initial success as a professional trader, Thomas Busby was nearly wiped out in the stock market crash of 1987. Rebounding from that devastating experience, he devised an innovative risk-averse, high-percentage method of day trading that allowed him to reap enormous profits from the market while avoiding its pitfalls.

Now you can benefit from his quarter-century of market experience distilled in this highly readable, deeply informative volume. Winning the Day Trading Game will show you how to mine the tremendous opportunities available in the market today. You'll learn how the author took his early fascination with trading from a part-time hobby to a full-time—and highly profitable—livelihood. You'll also discover how he bounced back from the most shattering loss of all: the loss of his self-confidence after Black Monday.

Busby describes the watershed moment that changed his life. Recounting his hard-won recovery from the "dark years," he will teach you the difference between working hard and working smart. You'll understand the crucial role psychology plays in the trading game. And you'll find out why risk management—not profit-taking—must be the day trader's highest priority.

In Winning the Day Trading Game, you'll learn:

• The importance of timing, and how successful traders know when to trade
• The "key numbers" in trading and how to use them
• How learning to "read the tape" can liberate you from mounds of confusing data
• How to get your emotions under control
• The "Three T's" of trading
• The news you can use—and the news you can't
• How to study the market before you trade
• How to prepare to win

With a clearly presented analysis of key factors—abundantly illustrated with tables, charts, and engaging anecdotes—Winning the Day Trading Game will serve as a perfect introduction for the novice, as well as a clarifying, insightful guide for the established trader.

As the author says, "Trading is a journey." In Winning the Day Trading Game, you'll find an indispensable guide that will enable you to reap the uncommon rewards that come to those who know how to win.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (December 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471738239
• ISBN-13: 978-0471738237
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #306,350 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading if you are a trader..., March 18, 2006

By	Andrew P. Kasch "winning financial strategies... (California USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

...but most everything is, isn't it? Reading other trader's thoughts and ideas is what helps us keep on top of our game. Even some little obscure paragraph buried somewhere in a trading book has the potential to be the acorn that grows into an oak tree. That's why we all keep reading all the books!

I took away some valuable nuggets from this book. Nothing that I didn't really know already, but sometimes things you already know get presented in a different manner and that's what finally turns the light bulb on for you. As a stock daytrader I am always looking for ways to improve. There wasn't much in the way of stock-trading specifics in this book, as Mr. Busby trades the market direction itself, stock indices. But winning principles are winning principles in any kind of trading.

For me, the emphasis on scaling out of winning positions was a valuable insight. I have since incorporated this tactic in afternoon reversal plays that I like to make - and doing so, along with finessing my tape reading skills to get into the position (another point stressed in the book), has made all the difference in the consistency of my results with this setup.

I also have adapted Mr. Busby's mantra of controlling the risk and profits will come, as drilling this through my head was just what the doctor ordered for my trading mindset at the time that I read this book.

Materials like this book written by professional traders offer the opportunity to mine out the stuff that you can use in your own trading and help you improve. The author himself admits that his style is not for everyone and that a winning trader must formulate his own methodology. Reading stuff like this is very benficial towards that goal; therefore I recommend it.

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33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Pro Shares his Insights, December 30, 2005

By	Michael D. McGehee "Bay Trader" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Personal to the point of being colloquial, Tom Busby's new book gives you the sense that you're sitting across the table from someone over coffee, someone who is willing to share the hard-won insights and knowledge of a successful lifetime trading career. No less methodical or comprehensive for being informally written, not be mention being relatively brief (about 175 pages), you won't get through it in a day or two-or at least you'd short-change yourself if you tried. I usually highlight key passages in books like this for later review; but I stopped half way through the 3rd chapter since I was essentially turning the entire book yellow. Fortunately the "information" sections are interspaced with frequent examples, some from the markets and some from Busby's personal life. You won't find any fluff here.
Busby begins his book with a brief story of personal loss, the Crash of '87, in which he was both financially and psychologically ruined, and of his subsequent epiphany and redemption, the successful trading method he developed and parlayed into an even more profitable trading career. The description and explanation of this method forms the basis for the remainder of the book.
After the personal introductory narration he begins by describing the three core elements of his method, which he calls Time, Key Numbers and his Indicators, which he has collected and coded in software called the RoadMap. This is not, however, a self-congratulatory vanity "infomercial" from someone who is trying to sell a product. Except for a couple of specific proprietary indicators which he developed and only occasionally mentions here, everything Busby describes is essentially generic and off-the-shelf in almost any trading software product. What he repeatedly emphasizes and what lies at the heart of his method is a conceptual understanding of the global structure of the marketplace, its habit-driven repetitive nature, the importance of identifying the "Big Picture" and of correctly aligning yourself within that ("Long, Short or Out?"), the recognition of certain key numbers that are repetitively "favored" by the market (you'll have to read the book) and the necessity of follow-through support by other markets and market internals. He tells you, in specific practical ways, how to pull all of these things together, or at least how he does it. Yes, he'll do it better than you or I. But the book is aimed, it seems, at the "generalist" trader and trading student, who might benefit from a unified, comprehensive understanding of market activity and how he or she can profit from that knowledge.
Busby doesn't neglect or disparage "accepted wisdom." You'll find here all of the time-honored truisms that have been expounded by other trading teachers and coaches down through the decades. What Busby does, and does so well, is to integrate those first order principles into the logic and design of his trading method itself. Trade the method, he seems to say, and you will, by design, "trade what you see, not what you hope for," "take what the market is willing to give" and, first among equals, "cut your losses short and let your winnings run."
What I liked most about the book is Busby's emphasis on money management; if you were given a nickel for every time you read "Don't trade without a stop," you could just about pay for the book (it becomes sort of a running joke between the author and reader). Money management really does form the core of Busby's method. Don't look for a specific chapter on this subject. Instead it is so intrinsic to his method of trading that it is discussed throughout the book as it relates and is integrated into whatever specific area is being discussed. He identifies and describes how each of the method's core elements of Time, Key Numbers and RoadMap Indicators are designed specifically to facilitate capital preservation, foster risk management and help guard against the worst consequences of greed, fear and arrogance. The method itself seems to be a systematic embodiment of that honored trading maxim: Mind your losses and your winnings will take care of themselves. Except for Dr. Van Tharp, who writes primarily about money management and its psychological consequences, I can't think of another recently published author who has so successfully integrated money management into the very structure of his trading system.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winning the Day Trading Game: Lessons and Techniques from a Lifetime of Trading, January 1, 2006

By	John Atkins (Richmond, VA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Busby has done a fine job in taking his 30 plus years of trading experience and presenting everything in easy to read, story- like fashion so that the book is enjoyable and understandable from cover to cover. Rather than the lugubrious numbers and analytics which so many 'trading books' bore us to tears with, this book uses metaphor to teach, which we all recognize as a better way to learn.

As a trader of several years, with a fair library, this is the first time I have asked my wife to read one of my 'trading books' so that she might get a better underestanding of what goes into trading and into a trader's mind. She also loved it . Now, I am anxious to begin my second time through the book so I can pull even more 'pearls of wisdom' from it.

At first glance, it looks almost too thin and too easy to be as powerful as it is. Do not let the enjoyable story within its cover keep the message from hitting home and soaking in...here is someone that has "figured it out", on a day to day basis, and is willing to share it with, and teach it to his readers.

Already, I have taken sigificant lessons and translated them into profits. Specifically, I have isolated certain times in the GLOBAL trading day that allow me to concentrate my daily efforts to maximize when the markets will give me the best opportunity for a move.

The best way for me to explain how imoprtant I believe this book is for traders of all levels is to tell you that it gets a definite 5 Stars in my mind!
John Atkins