Trade the Trader: Know Your Competition and Find Your Edge for Profitable Trading [Kindle Edition]

I love reading trading books and I approach each one with an open mind. If there is one nugget of information inside -one unique idea, perspective or tool that I was unware of- then I feel that it's been time and money well spent.

I find myself struggling to come up with one in this book. The concepts are so basic, that really the only people it could usefully aid would be those new to trading. Probably the only observation I found interesting concerned pattern failure in 2009, and how the author believes that trading failure is a good strategy. Aside from that, it's basic (but nonetheless valid) advice on trendlines, stop placement, trading journals, psychology. Nothing, I'm afraid, that hasn't been covered hundreds of times elsewhere.

It's clearly written and accessible; Mr Tatro comes across as a likeable enough character. It's a fairly good (but brief) overview of the important concepts in trading, but doesn't add anything to the knowledge pool. A shame -I was hoping for something more groundbreaking.

A great book and a big thank you to it's author Quint.

I've been a struggling trader for about 3 years. I invest a lot of time and effort into my trading and over this time have absorbed a hell of a lot of material. But trading the Australian market in 2010 I have really struggled. Our local market has really slogged and whipsawing is evident every few weeks.

Quint's insights into the changed market conditions over recent years matched my own thoughts providing me with more confidence. Quint observed that what seemed
to work in the past doesn't necessarily seem to have a very high success rate today. For myself I have noticed this most with breakouts. More often than not they seem to fail, and often precede a hefty fall leaving you stunned that you once again bought at the top! Quint talks about how to look at trades such as this in a different way by thinking about what other traders and the big boys are going to do and acting on that - for example waiting for the breakout to fail and then fading it.

But what I found to be a godsend was the profit taking methodology. While trading the trader is a theme throughout the book the topic is mostly covered in detail in one or two chapters. The book overall summarizes a broad range of topics some obvious, some not. While many of the topics I've read in other trading books (I have quite an extensive library now), the profit taking methodology coupled with stop loss movement was completely unique and very straight forward based around scaling out of your trade in multiples of risk as opposed to random levels or perceived support/resistance levels.

I typically have placed trades with a risk to reward ratio of 3:1 or higher (generally aiming for 5:1). I'm refining this at the moment to aim instead for
higher probability wins to increase my win to losers rate however many times I have found myself right on the selection, right on the timing, and then watch
the stock climb half way to my target into a nice profit, and then crash into my loss. Over these past few years however 200 point reversals in a day
have become quite common often whipping me out of my position without notice.

After reading this book I immediately set my next trades 1st profit target (PT1) at 50% of my position to the level of the risk and then moved up my stop to break even after it was hit. I then scaled out 25% at the next level of risk up (risk x2 from open point) which has since been hit(stop again moved to PT1 point) and
I'm now riding towards my original profit target. With my second position recently opened I did the same but scaled out in 1/3's instead of 50%, 25%, 25%. I'm currently past PT1 and close to PT2 but of course given my stop has moved up am on a free trade.

This simple mechanism Quint clearly describes and has turned around my trading THANK YOU! Not because it has quickly yielded profits but because of the psychological factor. It is extremely liberating to bank some profits very early on and take your risk of the table. It's even more exciting to see your second target hit feeling like multiple trades have been successful. Finally it's great to be able to truly not care what the market does after you have taken that risk off the table.

The profit and loss taking methodology was an area of Quint's book that I had been working on refining and worked well to my style. Thinking in terms of what other traders are doing and fading the failures is another area I had been working on and will continue to refine. My belief is there is enough nuggets of information on most elements of trading that any reader would pick up something they can use to refine their trading and as such I highly recommend this book to others. It certainly made up the cost of the book immediately to me in it's results. The books is extremely well written explaining it's concepts in logical order and with thoughtful examples and anecdotes. Traders of all experience levels should have no problems understanding the concepts within with ease.

Thanks to Quint so much for sharing this information. People such as Quint and the Mike & the guys at SMB Capital (whom referred the book while I was blogging on their site and author of the also excellent book "One Good Trade") are a credit to the industry. I look forward to his next book :-)

First things first, I picked up the Kindle edition of this book, the first trading book for the Kindle app that I picked up was Options Made Easy: Your Guide to Profitable Trading (2nd Edition) . Options Made Easy was formatted horribly (charts, tables, etc) looked horrible and where split awkwardly. I'm happy to report that's NOT the case in Trade the Trader, stock charts/figures all where formatted as expected, and being able to highlight text for future reference is great so I'm sure my future trading book's will all be Kindle editions.

The book itself was great, a huge tome of technical indicators or grand thesis on market psychology its not (I already have plenty of those). It is however an honest start. I've only been trading seriously for a year, and like a lot of people my age I've consumed a lot of information via blog's/stocktwits/etc since starting. This should have been the first book I read, it would have gotten me off to an honest start and saved me a lot of frustration. Over the last year I've had to slowly come to terms with what time frames I should be trading, how much time I can realistically devote to it, how half hearted my trading journal was, patterns not behaving as they did when I started etc.

If I would have read this book first I would have been able to take an honest look at my situation much sooner and save my self a lot of grief. The author covered basically all my follies, from making sure your operating in the time frame that best fits your situation (and he presents the Pro's/Con's of all three approaches) to making sure you keep not just a Journal but an honest and accurate one (which is surprisingly tough). To the importance of stops and position sizing. It's not revolutionary stuff, but the author does present it all in one book, in a logical progression, in a easy to read manner with out all the usual cruft you find in trading books (all that extra cruft you usually find is my main reason for avoiding Trading books and sticking to blogs and the like).

The main idea/theme of the book is "Trading the trader". Essentially, he put's forth that due to the recent event's a lot more day to day people have taken control of their investment accounts directly and are using Technical Analysis/Chart Reading to decide where to put their money. I think that's definitely true...I'm a prime example of that, and so are most of my co-workers, and plenty of my friends. Obviously this does bring about a paradox/self-fullfilling prophecy when it comes to chart patterns (we're all looking at the same charts, all waiting for that wedge to break out). The author lays out his idea's for how to best take advantage of this scenario to maintain your trading edge and actually exploit this behavior for % gains.

So the next time someone ask's me "hey I want to get more serious about this stuff, where should I get started", I wont hesitate to point to this book and tell them to start here. I wish it would have been around last year when I first started getting serious, it would have built a much more stable trading foundation for me to base my skills on and I would have progressed much quicker and smoother as a result.