tactical trader

Take a trip down to your specialist bookseller or search through an online bookstore and you will find countless titles, all with the stated aim of making you a better trader. Many of these claim to help by giving you an insight into the work of someone who has made a real success of their trading. I know from my own experience that these are often empty vessels, devoid of any content of real value, or simply serve to rehash much of which is already available for free in the public domain. Working through such books is rarely a satisfying experience, much less a profitable one.

Not so with this, the second work from US trader “Chick” Goslin. At first glance the book seems to rely pretty heavily on page after page of chart examples and I was worried that, like so many other books, these were more geared towards padding than relevance. This is not the case here. Admittedly, the charts and their commentary do take up the lion’s share of the book but this is because the author contends that trading is essentially simple (but not easy) and based on three ‘laws’. He describes these laws very clearly, and then uses the charts to provide clear evidence of how they work in practice, hence the number of pages devoted to them.

I liked the style of writing a great deal: the book is written in very clear language, by someone with considerable experience of the game, and who believes passionately in his chosen methodologies. The use of analogy throughout is a powerful way of explaining the only thing that really matters to our author – price movement.

Working through the book is a bit like having a very patient teacher talking you through the essential steps to understanding. Curiously, it is in this last point that we also discover what will be the weakness of the book for many people. It is not an easy bedtime read, nor is it something to easily move in and out of. It takes concentration and hard work, something which many people find quite difficult in this ‘sound bite’ society we now find ourselves in…