Streetsmart Guide to Timing the Stock Market: When to Buy, Sell and Sell Short
Author: Colin Alexander
List Price: $29.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0071346503
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade (28 June, 1999)
Sales Rank: 31,202
Average Customer Rating: 4.2 out of 5
Customer Reviews
Rating: 5 out of 5
RockRoys two thumbs up. Always picking it up again...
This book has an exellent balance between TA and prescriptive action. It's not enought to be able to read a chart, you have to know when to act and what action to take given what the chart is telling you. This is not the very best book on TA, it is the very best marriage of TA and practical advice as to what to do with the TA. For example. Both for long and short positions he has a long check list you should make copies of and go through for each stock you take a position on. Further, he has three excellent case studies on buying into an established trend, buying a long term breakout, and buying into a repidly moving market. His 6 chapters on Selling Short are the only reference materials I could find when researching a book on shorting, still in print, of any substance. Again there is a checklist and case studies. Finally, his two chapters on Market Myths should be posted above every online investor's computer. As a long-time avocate of investing on both the short and long side of the market I love the symetrical thinking throughout this book. There is just no way you will become a good investor unless you adopt this symetrical view because as every investor must realize by now, the market doesn't just go up, it goes up 2/3'rds of the time, and down 1/3rd of the time at twice the rate. It's a pitty this book is so little known. If you are on the perverbial desert island, this is the investment book you want. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of TA look at the Bible, Technical Analysis of Stock Trends 7th Edition by Edwards and Magee. ISBN 0-8144-0373-5. Mere mortals should prefer Alexander's book. Best of trades!
RocketRoys
Rating: 5 out of 5
A good and practical book on Technical Analysis
As good a book as you will read on Technical Analysis as it relates to the Stock Market. Very well written and edited with lots of charts demonstrating real case histories of the strategies employed. All the material was practically presented in a clear and logical manner. In short it was a an easy read which is good because you will want to return to it often to review key points of interest. Stresses the importance of looking at the markets from first the long term (months) to the intermediate term (weeks) and finally to time your trades using the short term (days). Well done and thanks.
Rating: 2 out of 5
mediocre would be kind...
When I picked up this book, I expected something similar to the book All About Market Timing, which overall I thouht was a good book. However, I got something very different in this book. This book consists of an introduction to a handful of indicators, such as on balance volume, the macd, moving averages, stochastics, and some subjective price patterns.
The description of these indicators seems okay to me, although nothing special. He has a brief section on options, where he makes a lot of extremely dubious claims, including the often-repeated professionals sell options, amatuers buy them. I suppose if you repeat this lie often enough, somebody is bound to believe it. He goes on to describe what is apparently his preferred option strategy: covered calls. There's nothing wrong with covered calls or being long premium or any other option strategy, but to claim that one is correct and the others are wrong is quite questionable. He also is fond of uncovered puts, as a viable option strategy -- unfortunately, this strategy does not work out over the long term; you make steady small profits until you encounter a 10+ sigma event in the market, and get blown out. The lessons of LTCM and Niederhoffer should not be forgotten, especially given that equities markets trend far more than one would assume based on a log normal distribution. High probability trades are not always good trades!
I'm trying to get a handle on the intended audience of this book. It seems to be intended for people new to a technical approach to the market, and if that's the case, I don't think it'd make it to my top 100 list of such books. If someone is new to technical approaches, i'd probably recommend the much smaller (and in my view, much more useful) The Visual Investor by John Murphy.
Overall, I think this book should be avoided like the plague. There's nothing new in this book, just rehashed age-old advice, some of which is dubious, some of which is good.
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