The Trading Book: A Complete Solution to Mastering Technical Systems and Trading Psychology

The Trading Book does an outstanding job of offering step-by step explanations of trading strategies and methods. Anyone looking for a clear path to profits in the markets will find the pre-trade checklist especially helpful for staying disciplined during the trading day. Filled with insightful case studies, interviews, exercises, and guidelines for keeping a personal trading journal, this is more than a crash course for beginners or an industry guide for experts. This is the book on trading.

Author’s Note:

“Just tell me where to buy and sell.” As both an educator and market moderator, I have discovered this is the most common mindset of the novice retail trader entering the market, lured by the promise of 1,000% returns. The truth is that trading is a tough business, and if it were as easy as the use of a cookie-cutter approach to buy and sell and make 1,000% returns, the distribution of wealth in the market would be much more evenly spread. Instead, it is bottom-heavy, and top-light.

When entering the trading world, most of what we knew about the market was cursory, but we did well enough in our past professional pursuits to believe that what made us successful previously would somehow translate into successful trading in our future. It certainly was a big surprise to me to learn that trading every day in the market is a unique career requiring special skills executed in a manner quite contrary to the way our minds actually function ordinarily. It is usually only after many market losses that we are able to discover that our playing field is a beast all its own, the players all in a very specific game with precise rules of engagement, and the average retail trader, as I was, running in the field, extraordinarily and completely oblivious to many of the rules.

The retail trader is like that great kid from Pop Warner League, full of promise and burgeoning skill, stepping on the gridiron, only our opponents are the Pittsburgh Steelers—one of us, all of them. Get the picture? That, folks, is the reality for most individual retail traders, and it is why most retail traders, well, really suck. We don’t know what we don’t know! Then, by the time we discover and figure out what it was we didn’t know in the first place, the market has a brand new twist for us. For many of us, it takes a lot of losses to learn what we didn’t know—if we ever do so at all. Frankly, most traders don’t learn what is necessary and run out of money before they ever fully understand the rules of the game.

I am an unusual professional trader as I am completely self-taught, without influence or exposure to the “Wall Street” crowd particularly. Warren Buffett, who has spent his life and career thousands of miles away from New York in Omaha, Nebraska, has said often that one of the best things he has ever done is stay far away from the people on “the Street.” Though I can only speculate what he might have truly meant by that, I know that philosophy holds true for me.

Realizing I am easily influenced by other market opinions, I took a sequestered approach to study, and although I chose a few people to learn from, particularly Brian Shannon of AlphaTrends.net, I decided to carve out my own system built on simplicity and raw observable data. People’s opinions affect us much more than we might think they do, and since most people do very poorly in the market, well, you can finish the sentence.

The deliberate avoidance of the “expert opinions” allowed me to develop a clean, clear technical trading system from my own personal observations over years of study and application that continues to perform well daily. As I continued to trade and tweet in real time on my trades , I began to hear from many traders asking about ideas and positions. From the line of questioning, it became apparent to me that most people trading are adrift with a poorly developed set of skills, preventing them from developing excellence independently. Most retail traders follow trades somewhat blindly, have completely unrealistic expectations, and end up with hit-and-miss performance (mostly miss) because the rationale needed to trade well is clearly absent. In the meantime, traders consistently race across the minefield of psychological pitfalls that accompany a lack of confidence, internal knowledge, trading competence, and market understanding while experiencing fears of loss and failure. Desperate for gains, they chase screaming or apparently accelerating stocks or follow other traders, resulting in a cauldron of doomed trades. They are really just gambling with their holdings, desperately wanting to be, and do, more. They hope to trade well and succeed but lack a compass to deliver true direction. This evidence of a clear absence of trading aptitude, skill, and psychological mindset in the average trader in the stream moved me to write this book.

The market is a war with some savvy people who would like nothing more than to relieve us of our account holdings. There is a game taking place 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in any given market. There is no “free hand of economics” alive in the market; every day, stocks, futures, bonds, and options are all manipulated by the able and the crafty, and if we aren’t nervous about that with our investing, we should be. If we are entering the market with a lack of skill, we’re asking to be roadkill. This book will reveal this playing field, and how, as an individual retail trader, we can triumph over our competition so that we might join the ranks of the competent, confident, and successful trader.

Join me on the step-by-step journey to discover a pure, simple trading system, and learn to implement it through direct, real-life trading events so that you, too, can say proudly, “Yes, I am a good professional trader,” and have the results to show for it.

Contents:

• An Introduction to the Markets
• Technical Indicators I (MARKET POSITIONING SYSTEM, MOMENTUM, AND CANDLESTICKS)
• Technical Indicators II (MOVING AVERAGES, BOLLINGER BANDS, AND VOLUME)
• Trading Well Is Not Only About Trading Systems
• Trading Blind and Risk
• Waves and Fibonaccis
• You Deserve Success
• From Simple to Complex: Long Trade
• Your Trading Journal
• From Simple to Complex: Short Trade
• Discipline, Dedication, and Endurance
• The Ideal Trade Setup
• Nuances of Chart Formations
• A Recap of the Technical and Temperamental Skill Sets
• Self-Preservation and Support Structures

The Trading Book: A Complete Solution to Mastering Technical Systems and Trading Psychology By Anne-Marie Baiynd pdf