Review of Trading For A Living by Dr. Alexander Elder

Mike — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:15:35 +0000

My first review is going to be of an old classic, “Trading For A Living” by Dr. Alexander Elder, a Russian psychiatrist that literally jumped ship to seek asylum in America.

Although “Trading For A Living” was first published in 1993 I have read this book several times in the past couple of years and think that for someone just learning how to trade it would be an excellent starting book despite it being over 15 years old.

It doesn’t matter how old a trading book is as once you are in the markets for any length of time you will see that for the most part markets react the same way today as they did 15, 25, 50 or even 100 years ago. Fear and greed drive the markets. Always have, always will.

This is why so many classical technical analysis methods continue to work well today years after they were first designed.

Anyway back to the review…

Dr. Elder assumes you have little knowledge about trading and walks you through the pitfalls you will encounter on your journey. I really liked the initial chapters where he “outs” the trading products industry and how they often mislead traders with wild claims comparing them to the old snake oil salesmen.

The next section is about price action and what causes prices to act they way they do. He uses examples of how crowd psychology move prices in a market and how fear and greed rule.

In the chapters on chart analysis he introduces the basics of charting support/resistance, trendlines and some basic chart patterns. Dr. Elder’s writing style makes these all-important concepts very easy to grasp and the “newbie” should have no learning them.

From charting we move onto some of the most popular indicators in use today. How they are constructed and used is fully explained. No need to worry about memorizing this as practically every charting package includes these indicators pre-programmed for you to use. Dr. Elder also talks about several of his own indicators and how to use them.

The final part of the book is devoted to a couple of basic trading systems and how they could be used to trade. We also get a brief but good overview of risk management where trading psychology and money management are discussed in easy to understand language.

This book is excellent for anyone wanting to learn the basics of technical analysis. Will it give you everything you need to trade successfully? I seriously doubt it but it is a great starter book and is one of the easier trading books to read.

Advanced traders probably know most everything in this book so don’t expect any major revelations.

Review of Trading For A Living by Dr. Alexander Elder is a post from: Trading Tools Report

Trading Tools Report » Trading Books

Review of Trading For A Living by Dr. Alexander Elder

Most popular search terms for this article: