Thomas Carr is the CEO of an advisory and trader training service, designer of a MetaStock add-on toolkit, and partner in an investment firm. Known online as Dr. Stoxx, he is the author of Trend Trading for a Living and Micro-Trend Trading for Daily Income. His latest work is Market-Neutral Trading: Combining Technical and Fundamental Analysis into 7 Long-Short Trading Systems (McGraw-Hill, 2014).
Carr is an excellent marketer which, as might be expected, is the downside of this book. Without the tools that he sells, the reader cannot implement all of the book’s strategies. He may not even gain the confidence to trade any of them since Carr admits that “blindly following a set of systems” doesn’t work. When real money was on the line, he traded “in a very detached, mechanical fashion” and lost a lot of money—both in his own account and in a small fund for clients. By contrast, he made a lot of virtual money for the subscribers of his newsletters. The difference (aside from the obvious real vs. paper money distinction) was that he added discretion when making calls for his newsletters. He applied “God-given skills of discretionary analysis, skills that [had] been honed by years of apprenticeship under some of the great masters of the game, in addition to a long slog of real-time, real-money trading experience.” (p. 131) How does a trader learn the discretion that is necessary to make trading systems profitable? “You need to find a mentor who already has it and sit by their side for a while.” (p. 134) Yes, Carr is also a mentor.
Now that you know that, without a further outlay of funds to Carr, you won’t be able to trade all of the systems described in this book and that, even if you can trade them all, you will still lose money if you don’t overlay them with a large dose of discretion (gained only by spending still more money), what does this book have to offer?  (more…)