Channel Surfing: Riding the Waves of Channels to Profitable Trading

An excellent book for the price. Emphasis is on monitoring price action using channel lines, without an indicator or moving average (often pure noise) in sight. An easy to understand book, although you may want to read more than once to retrieve and consider all of the authors thoughts. Diagrams are reasonably clear. Shame no bibliography.

I have read many trading books over many years. This is now in my top five. Trading does not have to be complicated and unfocussed.

If I would have to chose one single book to recommend to beginning/intermediate traders, this would be the one!

It’s very dense on thoughts and knowhow behind but still written in a very readable way. Even though it handles the most efficient alltime core-basics (no damage to repeat them for anyone!), it also has quite some gems from the uthor in it, this man definitely knows and explains techniques you don’t find elsewhere in one book.

The layout is OK but some bold text, bullet points, “inside of article structure”, etc. would definitely add usability and being appreciated on a rework if planned.

Overall a great book!

This book has more unique and practical applications of chart reading than many books on trading. Instead of regurgitating the same methods everyone knows, Mr. Parsons leaves the well beaten path and shows unconventional entry and exit methods. He also discusses why they work.

He does make it look easy, real time it is not that easy. Some of the examples look like they have the benefit of hind-sight.

The reader should already be familiar with money management techniques and some chart pattern basics.

This is not a book for Quant – types. Discretionary traders who trade patterns (not oscillators, indicators) will find some gold here.

This book is one of the very best books on trend trading that I have read. The first chapter contains a comprehensive overview of the concepts to be dealt with in the book, and the subsequent chapters explain and expand upon those concepts. In truth, although the ideas are well explained, it takes a little effort to grasp them. But the effort is well worthwhile. I have already noticed a real improvement in my ability to understand and trade trends, and a consequent improvement in my trading profits. I honestly believe the book is great value for money, and it has already paid for itself several times over. Buy it, read it, study it, apply it, and it will do the same for you. There is no way that it will not!

I have been trading for almost three years part time from home. I have read so many books about trading that I am now having to sell some to make room on my book shelf. This however is one book I will not sell. Trading is all about putting the odds in your favour so that if you do the same thing over and over again, you will in the long term come out in front. Maybe I have been lucky over the last few months, or maybe the markets now favour this type of trading style. All I know is that I seem to be out of the markets more than I’m in, but I have more winning trades than losing trades. The greatest lesson I can give people from this book is to learn to have patience by waiting for the right type of trades to come along. If they are not there then don’t trade.
Patience and putting the odds in your favour is how I have started to become successful at last.

Buy this book you will not be dissapointed.

Good author

Excellent book on trend trading. Keeps things simple. Read it a couple of times to get all Parsons’ points. After reading many trading books, this is one of the more useful ones.

I really like this book. I have read about channels and trend lines and such in other books, but they mention it as just another technical trading aspect. This book spends at least half its time discussing trend lines, channels, center of channel lines, and various support lines in great detail. Lines and price movements, that’s most of what this book is about. Any technical graphing trader has to read this book.

Now for the reasons the book got 4 stars. The editing was sub-standard, I don’t think a professional editor was involved. The author also likes to ramble at times. His ideas are just sparkling, but his presentation lacks now and then. The last parts of the book were less interesting I thought. The author talks about support and resistance lines, but since he draws over large time frames in all directions, the lines become a web, as he himself says. Same with repeating angles. I think channels are a fine and simple concept that really speaks to me, but webs of lines are too confusing and attract increasingly subjective interpretation. At the end of the book the author speaks about using channels for option trading which doesn’t interest me, but might attract other readers. The chapter about math for setting stops was a bit too much for me, I can quickly estimate the prices for stops using a calculator or in my head, no need to be that precise or elaborate.

So overall, I highly recommend this book, but don’t be surprised if you love the first half and wonder why the second half is not as good.

I consider myself an intermediate trader (retail) and I use channels extensively. With that being said, I added nothing to my skill set after reading Channel Surfing. I had hoped to add some knowledge about topics such as mean price, but there was nothing. I suspect that the author’s understanding of the mean is very sketchy. “Linear regression” gets a brief mention, then he procedes with a lengthy section on what he calls “Center Lines”. This weak and out-of-context coverage of the mean left me wanting. The author’s claim that this book has something to offer the advanced trader is like a false offer size seen in the market. I whacked a star for that.

The beginner (in technical analysis), should be able to glean some skills from the book, but its not at the top of my list for that purpose. See Turner and Nisson first. There are some basic set-ups here that should be of value to beginners. However, I whacked a star for poor editing and hard to read charts. I whacked another star because he recommends starting out on the short side of options. I left him 2 stars for effort, and to not completely scare away the beginners, but I have one final complaint: There is extensive material about manual charting that seems obsolete in the age of pocket computers. If you’re drawing on charts with colored pencils and rulers, then you’ll find this of value. If you use (or plan to use) advanced charting software, you’ll have to translate his procedures into their higher-tech equivalents.

I have recently taken a serious effort to learn how to invest better, as I have had to admit to myself that buy and hold is a really poor strategy. This is about the 8th book I have started to read on investing. So far I have only read the first chapter of this book, but it has opened my eyes on how to read price charts. In a very simple method you draw a few lines on a price chart, and you can tell when to buy and sell that stock. Granted I have a degree in physics, but you could teach a 7 year old child how to draw these lines.

The book has clear and well notated stock charts which make the material easy to understand. The book gets more complicated the further in to it you read. The author points out that you don’t need to use the added complications if you don’t want to, but they are there if you want to consider them. I will delve deeper into this book, but I am very happy I bought this book, after reading just the first chapter.

I ordered this book due to all the excellent reviews on it, and when I saw the cover of the book with the surfing bear and bull, I figured it should be an interesting read compared to all those other trading books with plain or dull covers.

Anyway, enough about the cover. The book had great ideas regarding channels and they weren’t overly complicated or anything. Easy to follow techniques and strategies for entries and exits. I liked the section where the author shared the formula to calculate what the price should be at a point in the future, and how to use that prediction to set your stops. Recently, I entered a trade on Corning (GLW) based on the rebound entry just because I read that chapter the previous night and it worked out pretty well.

Some things I think would have made this book better would be to add a chapter totally dedicated to drawing channels. There are explanations on how to determine a channel such as connecting the highs and connecting the lows, and using at least 2 highs or lows (the more the better). But when price accelerates or crashes and the channels start to “fan”, or when the price starts getting choppy, I see the author drawing the new channel lines in the figures, but I’m not exactly sure how he decided that would be the new channel. When the price moves between highs and lows like a sin wave, it’s easy to draw the channel, but once it doesn’t follow the previous pricing patterns, how do we determine when or where the new channel will form? Would we just stay out of the trade and wait until a new well-defined channel forms? If so, that’s fine. But like I said, in the figures, the author includes all kinds of channel lines and points out where all the entries and exits would be. But how did the author pick those points to define the channels? If that were included, this book would be even more awesome than it already is.

One more thing that’s kind of similar to drawing channels, would be to include a deeper explanation on how “true” support and resistance lines are drawn. Those figures look like spider webs. Again, the author does briefly explain how to draw them, but I would like a section dedicated on why the author pick those specific high and low points versus connecting other highs and lows. Which highs and lows would be the most effective to define true support and resistance?

Overall, excellent book that I would definitely recommend to others. Easy to understand and implement in your trading. I’ll need to come back and re-read it again to make sure I didn’t miss out on anything.

This book is among the best you will find on trading. It is based on pure technical charting, no fundamentals here. The author shows how to draw correct channel lines on charts of any time frame. The principles of the book is to make trading decisions based on the inside and outside channel lines. In an up trending market you buy on pull backs to the lower channel line and sell when the stock/commodity breaks the upper channel line. In down trending markets you short the stock/commodity when it is at the upper channel line and cover the short when it breaks the lower line. This is the best way to trade 90% of the time, it works! This is how I traded for years not with the charts, just buying and selling on pullbacks from 2003 to 2007 it worked beautifully during the bull market. The author also shows that when break outs occur in either direction the usually come back to touch the old channel line they broke out of one last time, with that line usually providing support or resistance in the future which is the place to buy breakouts. The book suggests only taking trades with a high probability of success with limited downside. The book does encourage stop losses when you are wrong. I really like that the author explained that trading ranges are usually not based on price but channel lines where stocks pull back to a lower channel line not a particular price. Many traders are waiting on a specific price to be met while a stock is making higher lows and does not give a lower entry price while the trend continues. The book shows how to really understand the trends and price channels on charts, truly a simple method to profiting in any market. It really enables readers to make sense out of price action. I highly recommend this book for all traders in all time frames. I really wish this would have been the first trading/investing book I read and not the 120th. It would have saved me a lot of time and money.