Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Top Rated Traders Book, December 20, 2005
This book should be on the essential reading list for every aspiring Trader.
Trading is an extremely difficult business. It is often difficult to identify charlatans and myth from genuine journeymen and truth. Everywhere there is someone hawking a product with the promise of an easy path to success and riches. A primary focus of "Winner Takes All" is to debunk these people and their products. The real value in this book is that it is written by an insider - someone who has been a broker but who now trades his own account. It is rare to find a writer in this business who is not pushing some personal (and often concealed) agenda. Gallacher is one of those rarities. He is not trying to improve his station or business. He simply sets out to write an entertaining book that sets straight a few solid (and, for some, unpalateable) truths.
The hardcover edition is subtitled " A Top Commodity Trader Tells It Like It Is" . The paperback edition is half the price of the hardback and doesn't suffer the unnecessary hype; instead the subtitle here is " A Brutally Honest and Irreverent Look ..." . This subtitle is much more in keeping with the spirit of the book. Gallacher makes no claims about his own "success", he merely informs us that he has been trading for 20 years and that he has never wiped-out nor has he had to send additional funds to bolster up his account. At the least this makes him a survivor, which already puts him in the top 1% as far as I'm concerned. In any event one of the things that impressed me most in this book is that Gallacher makes no effort to bignote himself.
He readily tells us that he is very conservative (12 trades per year!) and that he strongly favors a fundamental approach. Having said this, and knowing he won't win any votes, he goes on to effortlessly bring a few big-name technicians (and other vendors) down a few pegs. Remember, here is a guy who at least walks the talk.
It is worth reading all the reviews because this book has elicited some extreme reactions( from 1 star to 5 stars). I believe the poor reviews tell us more about the people writing them than about the issues they raise:
The most detailed negative review is by maclee33 (1 star) who goes to much trouble to demonstrate an apparently incorrect argument in the book.
But it is the review that is fallacious, not the book, and here's why. Gallacher uses a chart from Murphy's book "Technical Analysis of the Futures Markets" (and I have this book too, so I can verify the chart) to show that Murphy's use of trendlines is after-the-fact and superficial. There is no discussion here about active and inactive contracts etc. Gallacher simply takes a chart that Murphy himself has used and shows how misleading it is to draw trendlines with 20:20 hindsight. As Alexander Elder points out it is easy to trade the middle of the chart but, in the real world, we have to trade the extreme right of the chart.
"The lesson? All examples of the alleged uselfulness of trendlines, flags, pennants etc. will, under scrutiny, be shown to be the product of hindsight, perceived after the occurrence of the events they are alleged to foresee...Chartists see what they want to see, not what is really there."
Admittedly this is a polemic statement (and I do not personally agree with it) nonetheless this was the point that Gallacher was making and I cannot see anything "egregious and inexcusable"(maclee) in that.
Another reviewer defends Larry Williams (who gets a caning by Gallacher) stating that he (Williams) " made a million in a year" not once but twice ... and then taught his daughter (how to do it)". This anonymous reviewer gave the book 1 star while pointedly overlooking the fact that Gallacher's actual criticism was based on Williams losing more than $6million in one account while "making" the so-called $1million in another account - an event for which both Williams and Robbins Trading Company were taken to court and convicted by the NFA.
Another 1 star reviewer was upset with Gallacher's harsh treatment of neural net systems. Another didn't like the criticism of Elliot.
I think all of these negative reviews miss the point which is that it is very easy to mislead people in this business and we should be thankful for good watchdogs like Gallacher.
The book is humorous, insightful and well-written. I usually prejudge a book through Amazon by how many Customer Rating stars it gets. Sometimes these ratings mislead or disappoint. In this case I think 4 stars is honestly earned.
If you read this book with an open mind you will treasure it.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must have for systems traders, January 8, 2005
Two hundred pages into "Winner Take All", you'll find Gallacher dissecting Ralph Vince's optimal F strategy for position sizing, pointing out the obvious ways in which it can result in dangerous levels of overtrading that can put you out of business. At the end is an illustration of a trader aiming a gun at his own head and blowing his brains out, with the caption "optimally f'd". While it sounds kind of tasteless written down this way, when I came across it the first time I was laughing so hard I had to put the book down and catch my breath for a minute.
That's the sort of work you'll find throughout this very contrarian text whose nominal focus is on commodities trading. The scathing commentary wouldn't be so helpful were it just being sensationalist, but the analysis throughout this book is spot on in addition to being extremely funny at times.
While Gallacher's coverage of commodities is solid, albeit fairly pedestrian, his discussion of trading gurus is simultaneously informative, entertaining, and controversial. Ralph Vince gets off pretty easy compared with how other revered industry fellows are lampooned. You'll find plenty of dirt on popular trading role models like John Murphy, W. D. Gann, Elliot, Larry Williams, Richard Dennis (and the turtles), Bruce Babcock, and Welles Wilder (not to mention a thoroughly deserved bashing of Neural Networks). Anyone who is following techniques proposed by those gentleman should consider reading "Winner Take All" just to make sure you're seasoning their claims with a healthy enough skepticism. As other reviews here claim, Gallacher may be doing his own manipulation on the data in order to prove his own points in this area, and you'd be wise to apply the same level of skepticism he brings to other figures to his own claims. Very interesting reading, and written in a thoroughly enjoyable style.
The centerpiece of the book is one of the most real-world discussions of an working trading system I've found. A standard trend-following breakout system is presented and shown to make 385% annually; pretty good, right? It's then shown rather realistically how commissions, slippage, and stop order issues will eat into that. Then, he analyzes the real capital required to actually run that system through its expected drawdowns. When
it's all done, that magic winning system is lucky to hit 17% across the amount of capital actually required to run it. Having built multiple trading systems myself with multi-hundred percent per year predicted results that actually lost money once the entirety of actual trading and money management was factored in, I'm shocked that more books on trading systems don't cover this topic. Note that some of the things that really bash the profits in the examples down are specific to commodities (like the limit down/up problem), but stocks have their own issues that are of equal magnitude (in my own systems, I've noted that the bid/ask difference on stocks going through a breakout on volume are dramatically higher than any model I've ever seen suggests).
In short, those looking for a healthy dose of anti-holy grail trading advice might do well to read "Winner Take All", and those building any sort of trading system should consider it essential. You won't get much advise on what to do unless you're specifically looking for information on trading commodities on fundamentals, but there's a lot of solid material on what to make sure you don't do.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
For thinker and veteran type of traders, not for novices, August 3, 2004
I was really surprised by the hard core negative stance taken by the author, presumably a successful commodity trader who prescribed fundamental analysis as the only means to "not luck driven" survival in commodities trading. He had used 76 out of his 229 page book to elaborate the "real failure stories" of Gann, Larry Williams, Richard Dennis, and the absurdities of Elliot waves and Fibonacci numbers.
I am not going to judge this book by its controversial opinion which most TA traders would disagree (please refer to the spotlight review by trader75. It's excellent). I just want to warn all novice trader readers that in case you dont know well about your own trading style or trading edge, dont read this book. In my opinion, both TA and FA are simply tools for profit making, the choice of it depending much on the traders' own personalitites, strengths and weaknesses that nobody else can really tell. Unless you had been completely ripped off twice (the author's standard of a successful trader, if the trader can still persist), I am afraid that you might not truly understand what your true nature is and may get confused by the author's very sophisticated arguments. Afterall, reading is meant for profitable trading, isnt it?
To me, this book is quite a fun read with good coverage on money management and trading psychology (discipline/technical (not TA)/mechanical trading), a good reminder of the limit of TA and a mind cleansing tool for the unwanted residue of my unplesant trading life. If you enjoy reading something really skeptical, go for it. Otherwise, please give it a pass.
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