Weber and Zieg P&F
Darn!
I was 17 pages into my review, caught a mouse key and it disappeared! Off we go again then.
V1 went into the book page by page - this'll be shorted. It's a nicely laid out book, well illusatrated, a good size and friendly read. Cover price £29.99, but usually available for less - I have a link to the Global bookshop on my site, which gets it for £23.99 and I expect T2W has a similar link operating. Good value at that price I'd say. (end of disclaimer!)
Starting with basic chart drawing and construction, the book includes info on patterns, drawing and understanding trendlines, price targets and so forth - common to all P&F books. What is interesting about this book is that they comment about effectiveness quite often - they're not slow to share their knowledgeable opinions on pickig the boxsize and so forth. Sometimes I disagree with the authors - there are a HUGE number of variables that can affect trades, I think it's incorrect to state 'X doesn't work', I tend to phrase it more like 'I can find no evidence to support the view that...' Just because you can't find something doesn't mean nobody else can either!
That aside I liked their approach - it's good to see people commenting on effectiveness as they write, far too many books (especially, it seems to me, on P&F) rely on things being just so because the last 20 books all said that.
Section 1 on drawing charts leads into 2, on Trendlines - this ends with a short summary on how you might trade the information gleaned so far. Section 3 goes into a wide range of subjects, some skimmed lightly - calculating price targets, stops, risk, pyramiding, 3 or 4 trading styles and a bit about brokers' commissions ... too much for 70 pages, I suspect they'd have preferred a much bigger book <g>
Seriously, this section covers a lot very quickly, for some topics it is really only a taster, showing you areas to investigate further.
Two more sections follow, Optimisation is interesting and gives food for thought, continuing the theme seen throughout this book - how can I use this to trade? The final section (barring index and various Appendices) devote 40 pages to looking at studies (backtesting) with fairly recent tests. I applaud this too - far too often downright misleading percentages get banded about, and when you chase the story further you find you've been looking at a study conducted in 1962...
Overall - quite ambitious, tries to cover more ground than it has pages for - this would have made a bigger book quite easily, but would have edged into the 'deep thought' arena as the price rose - I suspect this book was deliberately kept this size to make it appeal to more users. I kept getting the feeling that the authors wanted to charge off into a deep, heavily mathematical study which I'd have welcomed personally, I thought they did a good job of shining a light on the subject which is a nice contrast with the somewhat formulaic approach of other books on the subject.
I'd place this at the beginner - Intermediate level, it explains the basics for new P&F users but contains info and ideas that many a more experienced user will happily chase up.
Good value
