Option

I read this book a couple years ago. On my first pass, I really enjoyed reading the book. The material seemed to be well presented. I'm a programmer and I needed a volume indicator for my charting application, and OBV was the way to go. I began writing the algorithms to add an OBV indicator to my application, and that's when I began noticing them. ERRORS. In the heart of the technical discussion of OBV, dozens of discrepancies and vague sentences that made it near impossible to generate accurate algorithms. It's a good thing I had other resources at my disposal. I contacted the author to get clarifications and I received a form letter. That was a lot of help. I was also sent a catalog, and encouraged to purchase high dollar training courses. Right! That book remains on my shelf, unused. There are many other sources, that are much more reliable, that don't require an author's intervention to clarify details! Personally, I wouldn't purchase another book by this author. At one time, he may have had a passion for trading and teaching, but it is no longer evident.

As and introduction to technical analysis techniques and their application, this book is satisfactory. Unfortunately, it was written pre-internet and pre-laser printer (mid/late 80's). The example charts are a bit ragged - they look like they were printed on an old dot matrix printer - and they aren't especially clear. And much of the book is dedicated to step-by-step proceedures for doing the calculations - not terribly useful information when all this analysis is now available for free via the internet.

Given the price, I would recommend more recent books by Martin Pring or the updated classic by John Murphy. The practice of technical analysis has changed dramatically since Eng authored his book.

This book covers a few of the more popular indicators in some detail, and as such I think it's a helpful book. Some of the more encyclopedic volumes, like Marty Pring's, can be overwhelming. This is not a bad place to start learning about technical analysis, or to review some basics.

I couldn't stop laughing as I read this book. Unfortunately, I know the author and his reputaion as a huckster and this comes out plain and clear in this book. I am a floor trader and I have made money trading. I believe the author was at best a mini trader on the Mid-America exhange which is like playing pop warner football versus the big Chicago Exhanges--Merc and CBT. Even at the Mid-America I was told he could not make money. I guess the adage if you can't trade then teach or write best applies--in this instance even the writing and the concepts are vacant!! Don't be fooled by the hype--steer clear of this book. It's totally fiction.

This book is a series of discussions between author Neil T. Weintraub and some of the most successful people trading on the Chicago markets today. Like the trades, the information flies fast and furious, and one trader's ideas may completely contradict another's. But most seem to agree that the keys to successful trading are discipline, psychological stability and a solid understanding of risk management. You will succeed in the Chicago markets if you keep your cool and stick to your system, no matter what's happening. This chat-happy book offers many perspectives, ideas and experiences from extremely knowledgeable sources. The uninitiated reader might find it difficult to follow some of the more jargon-laden discussions and the initiated reader might find the chattiness to be disturbing or irrelevant. But regardless of which category you're in, we [...] recommend this book as a valuable introduction or a helpful trade manual.

Wow! this book has some bad reviews. I am really surprised, perhaps some of the reviewers really expected to be handed a real trading system for 29.95. The book jacket definitely over-promises based on what is inside, but there is still tremendous value in here. If you look past the blatant attempts by some of the interviewees to market their services and take the nuggets where you find them then you will have not wasted your time.

I know several of the traders interviewed in the book. They have reputations that span the spectrum. But the really outstanding interviews were of the traders that you don't find interviewed in other texts. The nameless Phantom, CV, the Committee and Mark Brown interviews come to mind. They are worth the price of the book. The pit stops are also useful, but in some cases are found in other texts

This could be a good book if it weren't for all of the errors. The typos, inconsistent formulas, and algebraic mistakes make you wonder if the author was awake when he wrote this book.

This could have been a very valuable addition to my growing list of books on derivative pricing. As many other readers have mentioned, there are so many typos as to make it nearly worthless to the reader. The author, publisher or editor owes every purchaser of this book a complete errata sheet (could be as large as the book itself). I did find the section on the distribution of the correlation coefficient very interesting.

I have read P.G. Zhang's extoic options with great interest. It provides the readers with overview of the extoic options commonly seen in the markets. However, most readers will be turned off by the complicated calculation of the pricing of the extoic options. But it's still give you an overview of the extoic options. It's a good buy

It's been a very long time that I put such a negative comment on a trading psychology book. Without exaggeration, this is by far the worst book of its kind I had ever read. My feeling is that the author had tried to hard push those psychology principles on trading without knowing much about trading at all. It's like watching somebody who read or write a lot of driving technique books, but without a driving license, tries to teach somebody else to drive. I really did not have such frustrating feeling in reading similar books, such as "Beyond Greed and Fear: Understanding Behavioral Finance and the Psychology of Investing by Hersh Shefrin" and "The Psychology of Finance by Lars Tvede". Put it straight, there are much better alteratives for readers interested in this topic.

Save your money. Authored by a psychologist turned day-trader, this book fails miserably as a treatise on how to manage your emotions when trading stocks. Experienced traders will find no revelations here and novices would be infinitely better off reading Elder's "Trading For a Living: Psychology..." or Pring's "Investment Psychology Explained".

This book offers insight into the emotions and motivations of a trader. It is not going to provide trading or technical analysis strategies in any depth. That is not what this book is about. It is an exercise in self-assessment. The idea is to learn what type of trader you are, to handle your emotions, and to be able to deal with the movements of the market. If you want to examine the mental/emotional aspects of investing, then it is useful.

If you are brand new to options and you are not the visual type (there isn't a single graph in this book) and you like cute little cartoons, then this book is for you.

Most of this book focuses on various naked strategies which work great in certain markets, but can be instant death in others. Also, there is very limited information on resources to use in your research.

From a literary point, the flow of the book is quite good, so I could see someone reading it from cover-to-cover. If you are a self-help person, you'll love this book, but you will still have the same issue that after you finish it, you may feel better, but you aren't any smarter.

Go do some searches on the web for info. Optionetics.com, optionvue.com, and 21stCenturyOptionsEducation.com are all good places to start. _The Stock Market Course_ by Fontanills and Gentile (Optionetics) is great and for general trading info and an attitude adjustment, check out _Trading for a Living_ by Elder.

Happy Trading!

This is one of the best options books I have read. Ken Trester
gives details of what situations to apply the strategies instead
of the usual boring options books that just describe the strat-
egies. His newsletter services are very good. I have tracked the
trades in his Put and Call Tactician newsletter and most of them
have performed admirably - he even recommended AAPL Put just
before the stock collapsed.

If you are a fan of Lawrence McMillian and love to thread through pages of frivolous information, you probably won't enjoy this book.

The Complete Option Player is 46 chapters and 500 pages of powerful information. Once you begin reading, you won't want to put this book down.

You will find insider secrets and other advice that you will not find anywhere else.

Chapter 38 - Option pricing is probably the most important chapter in the book, especially for new traders. Trester also includes call and put option tables to assist the investor.

Overall, a very good book and a great supplement to Wall Street Money Machine #1 and #2. I would also recommend Wall Street Money Machine #4, which is all about option trading in addition to this book.

The book started with so much promise and unfortunately, just fizzled out with very basic, very vague and ineffective TA. Just a very basic primer on moving average crosses, reversal and entry bar patterns, stochastics, MACD, OBV and some other minor items. I did find the Lindahl buy/sell pattern setup to be fairly unique .. though hardly remarkable.

In all honesty, I didn't try the system or even try to test it. The entry consists of a checklist of 24 chart-based technical indicators or conditions for both weekly and daily prices-- thus 48 items in all. These are explained, sometimes clearly and sometimes vaguely in 19 chapters. Altogether, it is one of the most complex systems ever published. Though it may or may not work, its "kitchen sink" approach makes it too complex to understand well, and if there is one requirement for a good trading system, it is that the trader should be able to comprehend what he is doing and why at all times. If it starts to fail, you will never know why. While each of the technical methods presented is sound, Alexander's use of all of them at once makes for a mess rather than a good system.

This book helped me in several aspects. 1. It helped keep me from over trading (my weakness) 2. It helped me to determine if a move counter to trend was likely to succeed or fail. 3. It has helped my profitability. Yes there are only a few major turns every year, but Alexander also discusses "how to enter a rapidly moving market." This adds to the number of trades one can do with this "system." Other reviews are correct, it is not for the day trader. I did have to read it three or four times and marked it up pretty good. I have three different software programs and found the things from the book could be programmed into Metastock Explorers and Advisors (my lower end software) with some, but not too much, effort.

Very basic book not worth the $1.... I have been in the derivative market for 5 years. For a beginner, there are much better books out there that cover all the material of this book in one chapter.

I found this book to be a good beginner book in trading . The chapters didn't go into much depth for more advanced traders . I would say that if your imtimidated by math then this book will be a good buy , but if you want depth and a bang for your buck ..you could do better.

The best way explained how an option price is calculated - use a dice ! The rest is ... idea-giving, good.

This book is primarily about the role of portfolio insurance in the market crash of 1987. Despite the Amazon listing, I don't believe that Harry Markowitz is a co-author. Unfortunately, unless a reader is already well informed about the crash, he will not realize that there are many factual misrepresentations, particularly those that have to do with Jacob's critique of the way portfolio insurance was marketed. I was an eyewitness at the time, so I know what actually happened. Jacobs also has a bad habit of using cited quotes or cited paraphasing, which gives the book an air of scholarly authority, that he then improperly interprets out of context. Jacobs clearly has some reason for his own vendeta and crusade against portfolio insurance that causes him to seriously overstate the case against it and even to attempt to unfairly damage the reputations of those involved.

This is a badly written, repetitive and self-serving account, largely, of the foolishness of "portflio insurance." That things which are "just like" something else may not be so in reality, and that magic fixes in the market (which after all fly in the face of the rational-expectations/efficient-market hypotheses which often are built into the view of the market being relied on) I guess needs to be pointed out regularly, since hope of quick, uninformed, and painless fixes seem to reoccur with each new wave of financial charlatans and the greed they feed on. Jacobs does point out such problems for a particular, rather bizarre episode, and suggests, not too coherently, that such "scams" are still prevalent. However, He does this in a horribly repetitive and self-laudatory way that is not really very clearly argued.

he book provides an extremely enlightening treatment of arcane financial strategies that have derived from Nobel Laureate winning option pricing theory. It is a well-written description of how very smart people are able to "outwit" other supposed very smart people by promising something for nothing. There will always be those who will dream up complicated strategies that purport to promise high return for low risk and thus demand a premium for providing their strategy. The book reminded me of Albert Einstein's work for the Swiss Patent Office at the turn of the century. He would daily receive applications for new and different perpetual motion ideas. Sometimes the ideas were so complicated Einstein could not readily find their flaw. (Finally, he encouraged the patent office to pass a ruling stating that anyone wishing to patent something which broke the second law of thermodynamics had to submit an actual working unit.)

Portfolio insurance was the first large scale application of option pricing theory. Long-Term Capital Management, a highly leveraged hedge fund partnered by the Nobelists, was the second large scale application. Both promised free lunches. It is easy for the disciplined, long-term, individual investor to look at the 1987 crash and the LTCM debacle and conclude that it doesn't matter. The ones who were harmed the most were the purveyors of these supposed perpetual motion machines as well as the investors who "played with this fire". In fact, however, Jacobs' book is a wake-up call that these new financial strategies have become so far reaching, that they can have significant impact not only on the financial markets, but on the global economy as well. The missing element in the book is a way for regulators to rein in an industry that is out of control and return it to its basic purpose: moving money from people that have it (investors) to people that need it and educating the investor on the risk/reward tradeoffs. The industry subrole of shifting risk from people who cannot accept it (e.g. farmers) to those who can (speculators) is also valid, however, it has become so pervasive and sophisticated that it begs for a return to sanity. Absent that, Jacobs' book is an eye-opener, and a must read for anyone hoping to cope with today's complicated markets.

I dislike this book for a number of reasons. Firstly it is incomprehensible, especially the examples. Some of the concepts are also not well explained. Secondly, it is not user-friendly. The ideas demonstrated are not presented in a coherent manner. Lastly, being basically a compilation from different authors, the chapters are also not well connected to each other. Overall a very poor effort.

About half the chapters are written by various accountants employed by Price Waterhouse. Only 2 out of about 20 chapter authors are recognizable names in the field.

When it comes to Derivative products, pricing, valuation, the markets, and all the other issues, such as rating, documentation, accounting and taxation, you could not get a better mentor than Satyajit DAS, and this book is his best ever. It is a collection of topics and authors who are the leaders and the best in the field. THERE is simply NO other book that can be called a HANDBOOK on Derivatives, for everyone, students, financial professions, and professors, and for beginners, as well as advanced.

First part explains option trading platforms and order routing, and is very confusing. The interviews with option traders in the second part mostly concentrate on differences between electronic trading and trading on the floor. The rest of the book is a very basic description of what options are and what technical analysis is. That's it. Nothing in the book can be used for option trading.

This book tries to be too many things at once and so it fails to give you enough detail on anything specific. Part one covers options markets, order types, options strategies and even a bit of the history of the evolution of the options trading field. Part two is interviews. Part three is basic technical analysis concepts. Part four deals with the psycological aspects of trading. All of this rather briefly. On any of the above you need much greater detail if you are serious about options trading. Use this book as an introduction only.

This is a very informative book about trading options electronically. The emphasis is on thoroughly discussing different trading platforms and techniques to be used to trade on them profitably. Howard is very strong on explaining different trading methods. I like all his books.