Investment Secrets of a Hedge Fund Manager: Exploiting the Herd Mentality of the Financial Markets by Laurence A. Connors and Blake E. Hayward

Summary: Good book with clear trading rules. Many statistics and actual examples are there to explain what the trading setups are trying to accomplish. Not a book for beginners as the information provided are quite technical in nature. The language used can be offending to people who cannot put down their ego to see what the other side of the game has been doing to take their money.

Review

This book is the first one coming from Mr. Connors many years ago that redefined what trading books are. It created a new genrie of trading books based on backtested results, not some vague trading rules that can be interpreted differently by different people. In this aspect, this book is a must read for all modern traders.

There are 4 main “secrets” disclosed in the book. And then there are also several new indicators grouped into one chapter with fully disclosed rules. The rest of the book are filled with examples, backtest results to support the disclosed trading setups.

For some people, they feel like they are not really reading a book. That led to many very negative responses. Maybe they are looking for a book at hand holds them with reader friendly language, funny stories, etc. Instead they get this cold hard facts driven book with at least 2 chapters identifying many people as traders who lose. This drives a lot of people angry.

This book is useful if you actually code the rules yourself and examine the results yourself one by one to understand the concepts behind each trading setup presented. Then you will realize why the book has a subtitle “Exploiting the Herd Mentality of the Financial Markets”. Short of doing that and not following the advice to setup your battle plan before each trading day by having all the analysis done already, you will not really gain any benefit from the book.

So I have to ask the question myself if I am going to recommend this book.

I recommend this book just on the trading setups themselves if you are going to implement the models and study them carefully.

I would not recommend this book to beginners because it is difficult to absorb the material until they are more experienced.

This book, for some reason, can be found in many libraries. So pick this up from the librarys for a quick read is not a bad idea.

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