Tricks of the Floor Trader: Insider Trading Techniques for the Off-the-Floor Trader by Neal T. Weintraub

Summary: A book that captures the pre-bot era floor trading techniques with ideas that the readers have to confirm themselves as I found many of the ideas do not show enough bias to be used as-is.

Review

This book is organized into 4 parts (I do not count the last part for obvious reasons) – tricks, tips, traps and spreads. Each part is a collection of short trading related writing / ideas. For beginners and non-traders, the book is full of interesting terms and concepts making it a good read.

Sounds familiar? Yep, the book is like a blog collection but at the time the book was written, there was no blog. Hence the book was pretty well received at the time it was published.

For traders looking for useful information, however, this book presents more problems than solutions.

I found many ideas in the book is contrary to what I know about the markets. Some ideas presented are similar to the heresays I heard from the floor years ago that do not hold up when you test the ideas rigorously. Readers have to really apply critical thinking on the materials presented to pick out the meaningful ideas from the ones that are not.

Many ideas in the spreads section of the book are old correlations. Many of them are no longer working in the current environment. The useful idea that you can extract from the book, however, is that you have to be creative when you try to develop your own spread strategies.

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