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Brooks, Trading Price Action Reversals

The third and final volume of Al Brooks’s series is Trading Price Action Reversals: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Wiley, 2012). A trader does indeed have to be serious to read all three volumes because, according to the author himself, the task is daunting: some 570,000 words.
Only half of the final volume is about trend reversals. The rest deals with day trading, the first hour (the opening range), and putting it all together, including 78 trading guidelines, some of which you may not have encountered elsewhere.
This volume is the most accessible of the three, but then my very tired eyes did a lot of work before getting here. It would be difficult to skip the first two volumes and expect to understand the third.
Brooks himself is not primarily a reversal trader. As he writes, “I prefer high-percentage trades, and my most common trades are pullback entries and trading range fades. I especially like breakouts because when they are strong the probability of follow-through is often more than 70 percent. I look less often for reversal trades, because most reversal attempts fail, but I will take a strong reversal setup.” (p. 463) (more…)

Lifestyle & Improvement

  • How to add an hour to your day (Harvard Business Review)

  • The Bucket List lie (Jonathan Fields)

  • Why all happiness and success fades away (Peter Shallard)

  • Why what you believe gets you nowhere (Peter Shallard)

  • How to really shake things up (James Altucher)

  • There are real-life advantages to being a strategic deceiver (New York Times)

  • Don’t let email run your life (CNN)

  • Great idea – change your smoke alarm batteries with daylight savings time (Lifehacker)

  • Yet another reason to get off your duff and exercise (BBC)

  • We make risk/reward decisions every day, all day long (Tech Crunch)

  • Tips from Thomas Edison (Open)

  • It’s looks like it is a really good thing I feel happy while trading (Forbes)

  • Natural approaches to combating the winter blues (Dr. John Briffa)

Fear of failure

Don’t worry about perfect.

The easiest way to fail the first time is trying to be perfect. In the beginning, understanding how different the experience is from how you imagined it is important.  Start with reasonable expectations and over time shift to unreasonable expectations.

Seeing others do it.

At the beginning you believe you will be successful. After your expectations for success are not met, your belief fades. Surround yourself with as many people who are successful.  Seeing is believing. You will begin to notice some of the little things that they doing.  The difference between good and great, I have found, is in those little things. (more…)

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