Rating: 
Summary: A very valuable resource
Review: I'm far from a mathematical genius, so I purchased the book with some concerns about it being too technical. However, I found I could easily understand the end results without having to understand the detailed math. In my view, you only have to find one indicator that is more responsive for you to deem this a prudent purchase. While there are many valuable indicators described in the book (with the requisite Trade Station Easy Language Code included), I found the automatically adaptive stochastic indicator to be the most helpful to me.
Rating:
Summary: A very valuable resource
Review: I'm far from a mathematical genius, so I purchased the book with some concerns about it being too technical. However, I found I could easily understand the end results without having to understand the detailed math. In my view, you only have to find one indicator that is more responsive for you to deem this a prudent purchase. While there are many valuable indicators described in the book (with the requisite Trade Station Easy Language Code included), I found the automatically adaptive stochastic indicator to be the most helpful to me.
Rating:
Summary: High tech - first rate tools for traders
Review: In this day and age of readily available information, super computers and advances in computational tools, the markets are becoming extremely efficient. If a trader or investor wants to keep pace or even "beat the market", he must become more sophisticated. Rocket Science for Traders offers traders the tools necessary to survive in the equity and commodity markets.The math and accompanying monologue may be difficult but the premise is simple. If the markets are somewhat inefficient then past prices contain information that is exploitable by the trader. But the past prices will also contain unwanted "noise". John Ehlers book provides the tools necessary to eliminate the noise offering traders a clearer picture of where the markets are heading. If someone understands this they can skip the math and derivations and simply copy the code into TradeStation and immediately use the indicators and systems. Or, better yet, use the indicators and cycle length measurements as inputs into other systems and indicators making them truly adaptive and powerful. I agree with the reviewer who said to "keep it simple." However, we should remember Einstein's recommendation that a model should be "as simple as possible, but not simpler." This book offers traders the ability to use state of the art signal extraction in their simple models. Anyone that develops his or her own trading strategies based on technical analysis must have and USE this book.
Rating:
Summary: Destined to become a trading "classic"!
Review: John Ehlers has been applying concepts and learnings from the sciences (electronic cycle and wave theory and physics) to developing trading indicators since the early 80's. Every broker's terminal has Stochastics, developed by George Lane and nearly every "tool box" charting program includes Gerald Appel's MACD, John Bollinger's Bands, Welles Wilder's ADX, RSI, parabolic and so on. These tools can all be useful .... But none come close to matching the originality of John Ehlers' work with cycles and the development of MESA (Maximum Entropy Spectral Analysis) as a market trading tool. The concepts used by Ehlers are very sophisticated and have never before been applied to trading, which is why they work. While his concepts take some effort to develop a full understanding, in "Rocket Science" Ehlers describes the indicators and systems very concisely, does not belabor useless scientific details, but rather acquaints the reader with the overall concept and then quickly moves to a discussion of how the indicator can be used in trading. In Rocket Science Ehlers not only provides several cycle-based indicators and a couple trading systems, but he also provides all the TradeStation code (also available for a small charge on his website: www.mesasoftware.com). Ehlers has also updated his earlier book: "MESA and Trading Market Cycles" which I look forward to receiving soon.
Rating:
Summary: Destined to become a trading "classic"!
Review: John Ehlers has been applying concepts and learnings from the sciences (electronic cycle and wave theory and physics) to developing trading indicators since the early 80's. Every broker's terminal has Stochastics, developed by George Lane and nearly every "tool box" charting program includes Gerald Appel's MACD, John Bollinger's Bands, Welles Wilder's ADX, RSI, parabolic and so on. These tools can all be useful .... But none come close to matching the originality of John Ehlers' work with cycles and the development of MESA (Maximum Entropy Spectral Analysis) as a market trading tool. The concepts used by Ehlers are very sophisticated and have never before been applied to trading, which is why they work. While his concepts take some effort to develop a full understanding, in "Rocket Science" Ehlers describes the indicators and systems very concisely, does not belabor useless scientific details, but rather acquaints the reader with the overall concept and then quickly moves to a discussion of how the indicator can be used in trading. In Rocket Science Ehlers not only provides several cycle-based indicators and a couple trading systems, but he also provides all the TradeStation code (also available for a small charge on his website: www.mesasoftware.com). Ehlers has also updated his earlier book: "MESA and Trading Market Cycles" which I look forward to receiving soon.
Rating:
Summary: Truly Useful Insights
Review: John Ehlers has taken important steps in expanding fully mechanical techanical systems. This book is written at several levels, with my appreciation growing each time I go back to get more details in my system development. His book is a great reference to developing indicators and systems that complement your own trading style. As I firmly believe that a trader has to develop a system that he understands and has confidence in, the adaptive philosophy embodied by his systems are necessary in todays constantly changing environment. This book is essential for those involved in system development of their own.
Rating:
Summary: Scholarly and Practical
Review: John Ehlers is a real-life rocket scientist fascinated by trading the markets. He applies the principles of signal processing in order to find signals (trends and turns) behind the noise of random moves. His book is the exact opposite of 'easy money' slap jobs - it requires attention and some familiarity with math, but the reward is that it takes you from general principles to the exact computer code for finding trading signals.
Rating: 
Summary: More #'s than a trader needs.
Review: This book might be relevant to a mathemetician, but to a trader it gets a lot more complicated than necessary. Most successful traders that I know believe in "Keep it Simple".
Rating:
Summary: Breath of fresh air
Review: This book stands heads and shoulders above the vast majority writings (pabulum) currently available relating to technical analysis. Any serious student of technical analysis can easily determine this in a very short period of time. Although some of the text gets very mathematically technical (probably way too technical for the average trading "bear"), I believe that John Ehlers takes this approach to try to answer the "why" question and to allow the readers to easily develop a rational basis/confidence in the trust worthiness of the methods that John Ehlers' espouses and promotes. I for one would not use any trading system/approach unless I was convinced that it had a valid premise upon on which it was based. John's writings, including Rocket Science, are clear and precise and make the task of validating or invalidating any given approach a straight forward task. My experience has been that even if a system works in actual trading, unless it is founded on valid market premise, its successful trading life will be short lived. I am in the process of backtesting and "tweaking" my second 100% mechanical trading system and many of the ideas in my second system are based on the concepts that John teaches in Rocket Science.
Rating: 
Summary: technicalities
Review: This is an exciting book, full of many good ideas. However, there are quite a few technical errors in the mathematics.
There are also some perplexing explanations in the early stages of the book. These compromise the good ideas that the author expresses. I also think it is a bit of a stretch for the author to say that the "easy language code" is easily portable to bacic, C++ or Excel since a few of the commands in his code would not work in these contexts. If one uses his comments on the code, these can be worked around.
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