The Market Maker's Edge: Day Trading Tactics from a Wall Street Insider

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing book- misleading title
Review: This is a good book if you do hot have other trading books on your shelf. Otherwise, I didn't find any other insights in this books that aren't in any others. As far as the "market maker's edge", it didn't expose very much about how market make's trade. It cover's a lot of the strategies used and covered in most good trading books, i.e. support/resistance, indicators etc. If this is the way that mm's trade - then I guess this book is accurate. But I would like to know what leads mm's to move a stock in one direction or another, how do they work in concert with each other to effect moves in a stock etc. Those insights I would find useful in my trading.

Rating:
Summary: Average in some ways, but top-notch in others
Review: When you buy a used book, you can tell a lot about the previous owner by what they decided to highlight. In the case of the copy I purchased, the person who originally purchased this title was intrigued by the discussion of trend following and support/resistance. Unfortunately for them, the advice this book gives in those areas is thoroughly ordinary. The fact they felt this title was worth selling is really the fault of their not realizing that it's the sections on position size, indicators, and gaps that are the really the world-class discussions in this book.

To anyone who has really struggled with the problem of position sizing (how much of a stock to buy/sell), there is only one right answer: determine the position size based the combination of where your stop order will go combined with how much money you can afford to lose. Josh provides a straightforward and totally accurate way to do that, something you'll rarely find in any recommendations for day traders. If you don't recognize chapter 2, "Five Steps to Determine the Proper Position Size" as the only right way to trade, you need to keeping reading it over again until it's totally natural to you. If you trade and you're not familiar with thinking in terms of stop loss risk relative to position size, you need this book desperately.

The chart-based examples in this book are mediocre, but the indicator ones are excellent. The biggest standout section (Chapter 17, "Oscillators and Reversal Indicators") covers a few of the popular technical indicators, showing you exactly how you could trade with them in a way most likely to be profitable. The little chart showing exactly what divergence between price action and an indicator looks like is worth the price of the title for those who don't know what that looks like--this is the clearest set of examples I've ever seen on this subject. Equally clear discussion of trading Moving Averages, Bollinger Bands, MACD Histogram, Stochastics, RSI, and Momentum follow. I agree with that author that he's hitting all of the indicators worth following for the short-term trader here. Focusing on this reliable set instead of some of the more bizarre things some traders follow is absolutely the right approach to trading.

Additional good sections in here worth owning include a look into the mechanics of what makes an opening gap in terms of what's happening on the market-maker side and a very nice chart of popular economic reports (CPI, housing, employment, etc.) showing how the market will normally react to new reports in those areas.

The main real problem with this book is that it was written before the switch to decimal notation on the exchanges, and it focuses a little too much on trading in terms of a fraction of a point. The author usually writes in terms of a percentage basis, the right way to look at stock movements, with a small conversion chart included for those not familiar with this approach. But there are a number of times where he breaks
from this and falls back to the weakly justified "set stops 1/8 point below this" kind of commentary that plagues bad trading titles.

I don't give out a 5 star rating on a book unless I consider it a classic in its field or it offers something really unique, and "The Market Maker's Edge" meets the latter critera: the sections that are good reads for day traders are both more accurate and clear than any title I've read. That's a very rare thing indeed in a body of literature dominated by ill-conceived trading ideas and downright fraud.