<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Understanding of Spread Trading
Review: As a professional bond and grain spreader, i found this book to detail the key points required for profitable spread trading. Abell distills the essentials(both the psychological and tactical necesities of a viable spread trading plan)for market success. I must disagree strongly with the last reviewer. This is an infomed,practical and well researched book,revealing the author's authors considerable knowledge of the market "REalities" of spreading.
Rating:
Summary: Spread Trading
Review: He makes spread trading understandable in a very practicle way. The historical data fropm Moore Research Company was also beneficial.
Rating: 
Summary: Waste of Money
Review: If I had wanted a psychology book I would have bought one! Mr. Abell is obviously obsessed with the subject as there is almost nothing in this book that gives the nuts and bolts of spread trading. 45% deals with the psychology of trading, 45% of it are interviews with "successful" spread traders, and the remaining 10% if you discount the charts deals with spreading. Save your money.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: If I had wanted a psychology book I would have bought one! Mr. Abell is obviously obsessed with the subject as there is almost nothing in this book that gives the nuts and bolts of spread trading. 45% deals with the psychology of trading, 45% of it are interviews with "successful" spread traders, and the remaining 10% if you discount the charts deals with spreading. Save your money.
Rating:
Summary: Napoleon Hill of Spread trading
Review: It has interviews with spread traders, a Eurodollar spread floor trader, as well as with Steve Moore who publishes daily Internet spread charts.
Rating:
Summary: Waste of Money
Review: The book was written 1997, do not get confused with the publishing date of 2003. The printed daily line charts are from 1997 without hardly any description. The same almost applies to the numerous useless pages filled with tables of historical spread trades that could have been done between 1981 and 1996. This book does not contain stategies at all. Furthermore the book is full of sentences of the following kind: "Computer generated Numbers. Most traders have a library of proven computer numbers. They may be applied with success in spread trading. The only caveat however, is that they usually are not self-contained systems and should be used along with the several other devices I have spoken about."
My advice: Walk away from this trade!
Rating: 
Summary: Title is misleading....
Review: The title is very misleading due to the fact that this book contains no trading strategies. It does, however, do a good job of talking about the psychology of trading (one of the most important aspects). The interviews are good but contain no real practical knowledge. In my opinion, save the money and go for another, perhaps more advanced book if you're concerned with trading strategies. I will not even recommend this book to the beginner for it requires a broad knowledge of how the trading floor works. This book mentions little about value (the MOST important thing about legging and trading spreads). As far as spread trading goes, this isn't the one. Dan Vassallo (New York Cotton Exchange).
Rating: 
Summary: Not too much about spreads
Review: The title of this book is quite misleading. There is not much information about the actual trading of commodity spreads, and more about general commodity trading. The chapter about investor psychology is pretty good. Don't be misled by the title. If you're looking for in-depth info on spread trading, you would do better to keep looking.
Rating:
Summary: You should probably pass....
Review: There's not much content worth your money or time in this volume, whether you're a seasoned pro, a raw trading newbie, or somewhere in between.
A large part of Spread Trading is given over to interviews, which illuminate very little other than a preference among his subjects for trading spreads with trend-following strategies. Sadly, Mr. Abell does nothing to illuminate this further. If you're a trend-follower already the info is nothing new, but if you're not the author fails to provide any tools for understanding why the strategy appeals or how to build a rudimentary system. That's a big shortcoming.
The rest of the interview content is equally tepid. In short, Abell is no Jack Schwager. His interviews aren't quite worthless, but there's very little to take away here -- for either beginners or professionals. If you're looking for interviews with traders who have made it, save your money for whatever copy of the Market Wizards series you don't already own.
Another large chunk of the book is taken up with charts and data tables detailing seasonal spread relationships. This might be of some use, but to make that determination you'll have to fire up the ol' CQG (or testing platform of choice) and test whether or not these relationships still hold. There's no discussion at all about how this data was, or might have been, converted into a profitable trading system. That's fine if you already know what you're doing, but if that's the case you don't need to make a donation to Mr. Abell. The data is intriguing, but if you have a charting service (and a backtester) you should just take a look at some spreads year by year on your own. If not, it's probably over your head until you develop a little more as a trader.
I'm a spread trader myself, and while I dutifully read my partner's copy of this book from cover to cover, I wouldn't recommend you do so. Buy this only if you're willing to pay the cover price for that seasonal data. At least you'll get a nugget of a trading idea there -- although one that requires a great deal of polish.
<< 1 >>
| 
