Hugely popular market guru updates his popular trading strategy for a post-crisis world From Larry Williams--one of the most popular and respected technical analysts of the past four decades--Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading, Second Edition provides the blueprint necessary for sound and profitable short-term trading in a post-market meltdown economy. In this updated edition of the evergreen trading book, Williams shares his years of experience as a highly successful short-term trader, while highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of what can be a very fruitful yet potentially dangerous endeavor.
Offers market wisdom on a wide range of topics, including chaos, speculation, volatility breakouts, and profit patterns Explains fundamentals such as how the market moves, the three most dominant cycles, when to exit a trade, and how to hold on to winners Includes in-depth analysis of the most effective short-term trading strategies, as well as the author's winning technical indicators Short-term trading offers tremendous upside. At the same time, the practice is also extremely risky. Minimize your risk and maximize your opportunities for success with Larry Williams's Long-Term Secrets to Short-Term Trading, Second Edition.
I was wondering on your thoughts about this book and finding none I had to write this review. This book is the mother, core and foundation of all commodity trading. Larry is not an author with a great narrative style, quite the opposite - you have to think hard to understand his message and to paint the bigger picture. But if you do, you suddenly realize all the "modern" or "new" (insert your adjective) strategies sold or advertised by current traders are really just the Larry's old ones with a tweak on top. And his $1,000,000 money management strategy is quoted still in books released in 2017.
So for me this book is great, at the very least it teaches you Larry's very unique approach to trading.
The perfect book to learn the basis of trading. It's very good because it explain not only the concept behind a good technical analysis but also the right mindset that a trader should have.
Another interesting book by Williams. It was funny to read how he had had a huge $3 million wipe-out in the futures market the year after writing his book about “how I made $1 million this year trading commodity futures”, by breaking his own rules essentially.
In this book, author re-learns his lessons, disparages and admonishes chartists, and develops a very “chartist-like” trading system that has enabled him (he says) to realize yearly gains upwards of 10x and more - at least initially, while the market cooperated. While I am not in possession of details on the trades he made, I note that he seems to have been active during the largest and longest bull market in history, those halcyon days from the ‘80s to before the big dot com bubble. In a rising market, most any system works.
As I understand his approach, he does a statistical analysis on a long time series of daily equity prices (day open/close, day high/low) and notices (for example) that after a lower close, the stock tends to rise higher the next 2 days in 55% of the cases. So he then buys on the signal, and sells on the second close. To protect his investment, he sets a stop-loss. Then he models 500 or so trades on the signal and shows varying degrees of excellent returns by this method.
And it worked: his track record as a trader has been (overall) excellent and apparently he retired with a net worth of about $20 million, which is decent enough, but curiously modest for a guy who claims (brags) he can achieve 10-fold returns in any market! I suppose he doesn’t like money all that much after all.
I want to do some modeling myself - a breeze with excel these days - but I suspect that much of the statistical bias Williams found was due to the steady upwards drift of the bull market during his time. As remarked before: the rising tide lifts all boats.
Nonetheless, I (mostly) enjoyed his general discussions and feel motivated to check out how some of his systems hold up in the current market.
What an awful book. Meaningless numbers are thrown around in a confusing manner, any useful piece of information is hidden between walls of text and useless screenshots of account statuses.