Traders of the New Era Expanded

It’s very rare to find good trading books that get information from legitimate traders. Not just the general nonsense about how to chart forex and make a million in 2 months. These are genuine traders and i have actually worked with one of them.

Just a shame it’s nearly entirely focused on stock trading. In Europe most prop firms are exclusively futures trading so was hoping for more futures trader interviews. Hope the author does one. Still a good book

A good book about how a bunch of traders are doing their job with today conditions of market: HFT, narrow spreads, volatility, spoofing, etc. A valuable reading for knowing how to fight and win in trading.

Great book. Great insights

for anyone interested in day trading, this is a must read before entering in the battle, i recommend it to anyone interested in trading

I don’t understand how anyone could give this book a negative review. I put it right up there with “Market Wizards”. If you are an aspiring trader I urge you to buy this book.

This is a book about successful traders who are thriving in spite of high-frequency trading. The author uncovers the many ways the HFTs game the system and how to defend yourself against them. To qualify for an interview in this book, the author performed a global search for the best day-traders. The results are a book that is critical to surviving in today’s HFT world.

Although I had never heard of the author or the publishing company, I decided to give this book a try because of the positive reviews and the hope that it would be similar to the book Technically Speaking. In Technically Speaking, very prominent thought leaders in technical analysis were interviewed. In Traders of the New Era, the author interviews people he’s met in discussion forums that claim to have made substantial sums of money in very short time periods. The author started trading in 2012. The interviews themselves are from 2012 and 2013. In other words, the author started writing this book with less than a year of experience in the market. This lack of experience colors the questions he asks the traders interviewed. Overall, there are several issues with this book, both in the information that is conveyed and how the information is conveyed.

To begin with, several pages are literally copied and pasted from the internet. Not a sentence. Not a paragraph. Pages. As far as I can tell the author didn’t write the original material (meaning that material that is copied and pasted from the internet), unless the author writes for, for example, the NASDAQ website. The author doesn’t hide the fact that it’s merely copied, so it’s not plagiarism, but the pasted material is available for free. Why I am paying for the book? This is lazy writing.

The upside to the pasted material is that it’s typically the only time where there is coherence and proper grammar etc. The book is riddled with typos. Additionally, when the author writes, he tends to make up his own vocabulary. For example, at one point, the author refers to the fulfillment of a limit order as “your order got done.” The traders being interviewed are not much better. At one point the author asks a trader whether he uses a very simple statistical tool. The trader explains that he doesn’t get into complicated quant stuff. Personally, when I think of quants, I don’t think of basic statistics.

The interviews themselves are mostly time wasters, as a result of the authors questioning style and his focus on the trivial. Instead of zeroing in on what matters, the author is distracted by the promise of huge returns within a very short time period. For example, in the very first interview, the author is interviewing a trader that allegedly made $800k in a single day. Throughout the questioning, the trader talks about his methodology in very generic and overly broad terms. At one point he says he likes to detect market manipulation and then capitalize on it. This, of course, doesn’t tell us what the manipulation is, how he detects it, or how he capitalizes on it. Instead of asking follow up questions to zero on in this specific, the author instead asks the trader about the difficulty in executing an $800k trade, then the author volunteers to the trader that he traded in the same stocks, then shifts to asking the trader about how it feels to make $800k in a single day. In other words, instead of asking the trader about anything material to making money, the author is blinded by the prospect of this trader allegedly making this much money so quickly. Once you realize that the trader has been trading since 1997, and a substantial chunk of his trading profit comes from this single trade in 2013, you begin to realize that, more than likely, the trader got lucky on a trade (if in fact it’s true to begin with) as opposed to having any method to consistently make this sum of money (Considering also that the trader talks in broad generalizations, instead of specifics.).

The information conveyed between the interviews is either repetitive or contradictory. For example, mostly each trader mentions that it’s important to cut your losses short. But, some traders recommend momentum trading. Others note that in the era of HFTs momentum trading no longer works. Some traders say avoid trading during a specific time of the day, others swear by it. You get the feeling that they don’t really have it figured out. One consistent theme is that the information conveyed is typically in the form of a broad generalization.

This is what sets a book like Technically Speaking apart from Traders of the New Era: in Technically Speaking the experts interviewed gave specific details. You learned a substantial amount from reading (and re-reading). The same cannot be said for Traders of The New Era.

Thanks,…I have a much better understanding of the problem now.

Might as well have interviewed just one trader – they all seemed to be doing the same thing. Section on self-esteem, disclpline etc. was the most useful. The endless typos were incredibly annoying. How hard is it to employ a proof reader? how hard is it to, at least, use spellcheck?

One of the very few books dealing with daytrading over the last few years, this book is probably best appreciated by those with some prior experience in daytrading.

No, you will not get exact recipes for execution; who, with an edge, would just hand that out in public? But reading between the lines so to speak, will give the astute, and and especially the experienced trader insights as to what is working for those interviewed.

One negative reviewer has whined that the advice proffered seems contradictory. This is simply a lack of trading experience showing. Of course there will be differing and contradictory methods. On the floor, we had all sorts of approaches, and consistently successful people trading against one another. Success depends upon what you have found to work for you.

Buy this if you’ve been a trader, have experience, or if just beginning, are smart enough to realize that no successful trader will simply hand you their method.

This is the practical, down-to-earth version of the popular finance book “Market Wizards” by Jack Schwager, in which real-life, “next-door” common traders that accumulated a lot of profit and experience, are interviewed by Fernando Oliveira, a former professional poker player turned into a profitable daytrader. He questions them on their personal trading policies and golden rules, and most importantly how they have adapted to the new high-frequency algorithmic trading market dominated by machines. He also has a whole chapter on tools, techniques and best brokerages to use in order to avoid tricks that trading robots exploit on natural human weaknesses and lack of advanced tools to place efficient orders. All of the interviewed traders have different styles that you can later dive deeper into by buying specific books on those subjects. Its not for beginners that do not know the trading “lingo” very well, yet its essential to absorb the knowledge of this book in order to avoid being taken advantage of by machines. It is a good book for retail at-home traders who want to advance in their education of how markets work, and learn to get a feel of the “market pulse” by understanding what “smart money” does and free-ride by jumping into their trail.