Victor Sperandeo says that if there were a Hall of Fame for trading he wouldn’t be in it but he sees himself as a career pro who consistently performs at an elite level year after year. In fact consistent performance is his central theme, which he says requires not only a successful approach to trading but to life itself. He delves into this in the second part of the book that is dedicated to the psychological approach.
The main topics in this book include: Preservation of capital, consistent profitability, technical analysis and trading rules. He tells how to spot a trend and discusses technical analysis. How to spot the tops and bottoms in any market. There is also a lot of detail about economics and what makes the system tick, which as he says he didn’t learn in school. Moving averages, booms and busts, and how to manage risk and have a good business philosophy for consistant success are also part of this well written book of trader knowledge. He covers a great deal of useful information in a very compact form that is actually easy to read and understand.
His methods are a mixture of fundamental and technical analysis. He uses economics as a forecasting tool and says that cycle analysis actually just gets in the way. If you can understand the fundamentals of economics you can interpret government intervention in the market and profit from it. University taught economics is useless for this. All booms and busts are a result of credit expansion in an effort to lower interest rates, whereas Keynesian economics attempts to use interventionalist policy to smooth out the peaks and troughs but in fact is the predominant cause. Surplus production, savings and innovation create wealth as much for the individual as the economy on the whole. Wealth is actually consumed by government created prosperity via deficit spending. You can’t get something for nothing. By understanding these cycles, you can speculate profitably.
Technical tools can then be used for timing entry. He demonstrates how trendlines can be drawn objectively to determine a change in trend using his 123 and 2B rules. A unique approach in this book is an approach to measuring risk by calculating market life expectancy profiles which he says has been instrumental to his success along with his business philosophy of protecting capital, consistent profitability and the pursuit of superior gains.
This book is as much a confession of the soul as a guide on trading methods, which I’ve found most of the best trading books are. He clarified a number of issues in my own mind and extended my thinking in critical areas.
