Option

This book contains absolutely no information on how to judge whether a particular option is over- or under-priced, or how to arrive at either a bullish or bearish outlook. The idea is that you have already come to some conclusion and then you consult the book to determine how you should play the option. That would be fine if the book did not contain numerous errors, all due to the fact that this book apparently was not proof-read. For example, if your outlook is bullish, you find the strategy for putting on a call spread, and select the type of spread you want to do. The author then copied the same instructions into the section on bear spreads, and then tried to change all the "calls" to "puts" or the "buys" to "sells." Of course, he missed many such changes, and there are multiple instances where the word "call" appears where it should read "put," and where "buy" appears when it should be "sell." If you buy this book, you will have to make your own corrections in it, or you may follow the instructions right into the poorhouse. I consider the money I spent on this book to be wasted.

The bad news: This is a classic textbook that requires all your attention and more. Even an experienced option trader can get lost easily. The good news: It is a comprehensive guide and reference book which I use once a week to help me choose the right move.

Option Strategies is an excellent intermediate treatise on option trading. While it doesn't go deeply into option pricing and implied volatility, its focus on strategy and decision structure serves the reader well. Almost every major position type, from the basic buys and writes to the more complex, such as ratio spreads and butterflies are covered. Each position is dissected in detail, with emphasis on how to deal with adverse and positive price impacts.

In the pantheon of trading tomes, Courtney Smith's work should appeal to those looking for a sound foundation in option strategy. It is one place where a trader can look at any idea and figure out which type of play offers the best risk/reward alternatives. A solid non-technical book.

From the content to the writing style this book scores a zero. The book is more of a sales piece for another book Stridsman wrote. I have never heard of someone being so stuck on percentages. Stridsman should be a middle school math teacher. Of course percentages are important, but I don't think we need to pay nearly 40 dollars for a magazine columnist to tell us that. I guess if you happen to want to buy his code for tradestation you might find the book more interesting, but you can get that stuff for free off of many sites. Don't waist your money.

Wow, what can I say? This is a huge disappointment. I don't think you really need this book because Stridsman's first book is good enough and better. The problem with this book is that the systems are rehashes of articles that the author has already written for Active Trader magazine, and the systems are not even that good. This book is "been there, done that" -- it does not advance the technical analysis literature with any new concepts or ideas. I had a strange feeling of deja vu only a few pages into the book. Again, I am really surprised that this book was released - cannot recommend it at all.

It doesn't matter how great your system is if you don't have a relevant money management strategy that will sustain you for the long run. Mr.Stridsman does just that. He does not pull punches in showing the relevance of trading systems and how useless they are if there is no money management component.

He then goes on to show you how to combine these two seemingly disparate concepts into concrete solution for trading jus about any market.

Where he falters is in the mechanics of the actual items that you can trade. Especially with single stock futures now on the scene I would have like to have seen some examples of single stock futures in the book. In this instance I would combine Mr.Stridsman concepts with the book "Single Stock Futures For Small Speculators" or "Futures For Small Speculators".

Otherwise I was thoroughly impressed.

First of all, this book is seven years out-of-date, and the snippets of facts that it contains are in large measure useless today. However, even in 1991 it was a weak book. Lots of fluffy mini-anecdotes and scatter-shot presentation of information on twelve countries. This is a book to be read in about an hour as a help in organizing your questions about living abroad; then look for in-depth help and information elsewhere.

I thought it was very interesting to learn of other options for retirement living other than the high priced, all-in-one "villages" in this country. Those "villages" are ok for some but, I think they are out of reach, monetarily, for most of us. The book, I think, helps people to reach sound decisions about other alternatives and what to consider when making those choices.

This book has some solid information, but it is all available elsewhere except some studies on Point & Figure profitability. However, tests in 2002 by djbaker suggested that the profitability of these signals had broken down, so i'm not sure how useful this book really is. Like the previous reviewer, i'd recommend reading the Dorsey book first.

This book outlines, in excruciating detail, how to manage basic point and figure charts. The only part of the book that can't be found on the internet contains subjects on optimizing the charts and recent (ca. 1994-97) analyses of profitability of the charts.

Read Dorsey first (Point and Figure Charting), and if you want to really get deep, read the last couple chapters of this book.

The book's indicators are not for the mathmatically challenged, written for Tradestation. That is the majority of the book - BUT, the systems used to win the trading championship were very simple and basic. Not these complex formulas. Looking at the equity curve and his spotlighted trades, it looks like he got lucky, catching the right 2 markets and 3 - 5 trades that made the contest for him.

The sections on setting up your screens and computer are obviously very out of date. Nothing special here, you're not missing anything.

it's not great either. I thought it was better than the other "1 star" reviewers. I believe I enjoyed it better because I had no expectation for this book to really teach me anything spectacular.

His work is not too complex, it's just that he presents so many indicators, and then combines them. I thought his use of Kurtosis was interesting and some of his ideas are worth further research if it complements your current work. If you've already devoured your favorite books and are looking to increase your stock in short-term trading ideas, it would be worth a read.

I have to agree with the other reviewer who said that his success in theRobbins Championship came from just a few profitably outlying trades.

Wait to buy it used for ... less.

Jensen has described mathematical methods for measuring, and then for predicting, changes in price momentum. This book is not light reading, but the effort invested leads to a method for computer-generated signals which predict when a price series will reverse. This concept can be a powerful tool, with signals which are leading or coincident to turns. Although Jensen deals with other aspects of trading, this is in no way a book for beginners. For the serious student of the market, it is more than worth the trouble.

This book is totally designed for very short term traders using computerized techniques. However, a novice might hear that market are choppy 85% of the time and trending only for the other 15% and think that this book can be helpful, but it not be helpful to you based on that kind of thinking. To see if this book suits your style of trading, you should check the reviews done by other traders whose situation maybe similar to yours.

Barnes does have some interesting ideas, but if you have Tradestation or similar, test everything! I found one system badly fudged -- it looks good only if you use the exact data used in the test. Go earlier or later and the system looks pretty bad. I am suspicious and in any case if you have to go over everything in a book to verify it, it's too much work.

The previous review gave this book one star and used as a reason the mistaken statement that the author's win/loss ratio on simulated silver contracts was 46/54. For those of you who KNOW what these numbers mean (active traders, most likely) you know that this means 46 OUT OF 54 trades were profitable. In my book this turns out to be 85%. Try doing THAT with a coin-flip.

In my opinion Robert M. Barnes is one of the most insightful traders/authors in the business. His systems, analysis and technical know-how are matched by very few. This is yet another very succinct, well-written, and technically informed book by the author. Anyone interested in serious short-term, high-profit trading would do well to have this manual in their arsenal.

I had rated the author's first book "Trading rules: Strategies for success" with 5 stars. I never expected such a frustration with this book.

Perhaps the trader did try to make this book as a day trader's manual by including everything he deemed fit into a 322 page book: trading psychology, rules drawn from his own experience, chaos theory and in particular many TA tools like Market Profile, Elliot Wave, Gann Fan, RSI, Stochastics and so on. He then used nearly 40% of the book in 14 cases to elaborate those tools. The problem is, though I believe it's the intent of the author to make the book as concise as possible, it's simply impossible for most, even some professionals, to grasp the usage of the aforesaid TA tools. Even worse, the cases just did not help at all.

In a word, a big disappointment for this one and I suggest those who would like to give the author a try to bet on his first book "Trading Rules: Strategies for success".

I returned this book primarily because it is fairly dated, given the technical advances in electronic trading since the publication date of 1993. I am a fairly active trader and have an earned doctorate in physics; Mr. Eng's discussions of Chaos, Entropy and Randomness left me with the suspicion that scientific buzzwords are employed to justify the empirical ideas of chart analysis. Friedfertig and West's 1998 book, The Electronic Day Trader, is a far more useful and current title.

I haven't been really able to use any of the things in this book for my personal trading. However, there is one thing that I find helpful, that is the table on page 30 & 31 which gives you a run down of the popular indicators and their deficiencies.

This book is unfocused, and what little information there is only describes a simple "two-leg" trading system. The author claims that this system is proven by historical data, but doesn't give this data. A publisher like Wiley should be ashamed to put out such trash by an author who has been sanctioned for scamming investors in the past. For the cliche (but true) trading advice given in the book, you'd be better of just re-reading Market Wizards.

It's too good to be true and written by a proven dishonest person.

Proven background of the author's dishonesty can easily be obtained from publicly available information from the Commodity Futures Trading Commision. In particular, CFTC Docket No. 02-08 was provided for the public to view here:

http://www.cftc.gov/files/enf/02orders/enfangell-order.pdf

Would you want to follow the advice given by the person addressed in that CFTC Docket? hmmmm, don't think so

Don't loose your money and time reading this old history

This is a very badly written negative book. The author did not research the topics very well and she seems to dwell on any negative thing that can happen to a woman. I had to stop reading the book because it was depressing me and turning me into a pessimist about my own fertility.

I did not care for this book at all. I found that the author's chapter on infertility was on the insulting side.

I completely disagree with the other reviewer - I wanted facts and information, not a feel good puff piece and I got exactly what I needed. It sounds like the other reviewer wants to be reading emotional self help books rather than informative medical books.

On p. 96-104 the author attempts to give spreadsheet formulas to compute stochastics, Welles Wilder RSI, and two other indicators he recommends. The formulas are outright wrong for the Stochastics %K-%D signal. Had someone proofread or even tried to recreate these in Excel, it would be blatantly obvious they are wrong. Upon contacting the author at his email address, he suggested that I pay him to receive the full version of the spreadsheet for several hundred dollars, rather than giving me the correction to the wrong information in his book. Also, on p. 78, the computations of the "safe" strike prices are based on erroneous data. I compared historic data from the time frame he references and it looks like he omitted data from August 1996 and just relabeled all of the rows so that the data from Nov-94 through Aug-96 is actually for Dec-94 through Jul-96. The Mar-97 MAX data appears suspect, being 10.33 rather than 10.25. The Aug-97 data for MAX and MIN appears suspect, being 43.63 and 1.59, rather than 42.72 and 26.50, respectively. It also appears that he is using the wrong standard deviation function to compute sigma. You can't duplicate his numbers in the C2sig13 and P2sig13 columns with the data he provided in the table in Figure 5.1.

His latest newsletter shows that the "safe" strike price for the February 2000 short puts was 720, but if you followed the instructions in his book, you would have sold the Feb 745 puts short and been out 22 points per contract on naked puts, or you would have lost your entire spread when the market dumped from 752.19 to 728.52 on options expiration Friday in February. His system for mitigating losses would not have worked either because when the market broached 745 that day, you would have paid about 6 points to close out a losing spread that you may only have received 1-2 points to open. These spreads he advocates are based on some very fast and loose statistical claims and not very thoroughly explained at all. Very dangerous!

Mr. Schiller has a PhD, but his book does not reflect much quality control went into its composition. There are missing figures, but yet referenced in the text. The book lacks an index. Several words are abbreviated, but there is no apparent explanation for them. I get the feeling this book went from first draft directly to publication. The hefty price is not justified. I am glad I only borrowed it from a library. The one purpose of the book seems to be to promote Excel spreadsheets he has created to track the OEX; and their prices are equally inflated. Why must you, Mr. Schiller, sell them from Spain? Isn't trading the OEX sufficiently profitable by itself?

I found this book valuable in the development of my options trading strategy. I do not follow it to the letter but I think it provides great food for thought. It's not great, it's not perfect, but it's not horrible either for someone looking for ways to trade. Dr. Schiller has answered my e-mails to him every time I had a question. In summary, I believe there are better ways to trade credit spreads but I probably wouldn't be doing it at all were it not for this book.