Opus

  Reading Price Charts Bar by Bar: The Technical Analysis of Price Action for the Serious Trader (Wiley Trading)
"This is not a book one can read. It is for study. One who studies this book is immediately faced with a challenge, visualize every phrase with what you have seen on a chart".

I was reading this in my hotel nights. Not suitable for the newbie, not a easy piece of trading study but it is the best book on price action I have read so far. There are many faults and repetitions and the writing is dry at best. Al Brooks is a serious man and he makes your effort to grasp his opus as big as possible, in order to increase your own effort!.. He is clever but also scholastic. He lucks one quality only : intuition. Trading is also intuition.

My Sunday with Euclid

""THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN BY A HUMAN. I'm not kidding and I'm not exaggerating; there is no way to express the joy of reading Euclid without sounding like a lunatic. There are very few books which reach their umpteenth thousandth edition without promising a posthumous infinity of bliss. The bliss of 'The Elements' is admittedly finite, but it delivers right away. This is an electrifying piece of work which has produced a chorus of rapture and inspiration lasting two millennia.""wrote a reviewer on Amazon.

I passed my morning today re-reading (10th time?) the geometry-dedicated 6 first books of Euclid's Elements. I have the chance to read them in the original : greek never sounded so elegant and precise. I felt the same joy and enthusiasm as the reader cited above. This edition is the best translation in english and comprises all the 13 books in one volume.

What is the relation of this material with trading, you may ask. In my humble opinion, trading is pure geometry. It is the skill to think visually, in the two dimensions of a chart, as the chess player thinks in the 64 squares and 2 dimensions. Euclid's geometry is the best exercise i ever found for training your mind to think visually.

During my studies back in the 80's, I got a "passion" for some other geometries too. Among them, the now out-of-fashion projective geometry. Twenty years later, when I started reading trading books, I was really surpised to discover that all this stuff was the inspiration for the trading patterns of the first serious, pioneering book on Technical Analysis by Edwards and Magee, the famous Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, written in the 40's. Human knowledge transplanted on an other domain!..

 To trade properly, you need just two things : geometry and table tennis. The first, explained above. Table tennis makes you fast. More on this on an other post!

A book for Christmas

The memory chalet

Tony Judt was a brilliant British historian who died last August. I started reading his last work, wich was  composed while he was totally immobilized by the motor neuron disease that was to lead to his death within a few months of its publication. The book is a touching reminiscence of his life, a testament to his courage and a fitting memorial to a great historian and a wise and humane man. Fascinating reading.

Le livre de ma mere

Albert Cohen, at age 50, speaks about his late mother. A SPLENDID little book that every son should read. I re-read it yesterday and had a big relief thanks to it.

Unavailable in english right now (on Amazon). The french original is here.

Books for Easter (2)

""The book is a stupendous achievement. Truly, can one think of another book (in only 800 short pages) that is able to contain a complete century, and all the countries, of Europe? And he does it with an artist's eye. Lord, how well this man can write."" wrote a enthusiastic reader on Amazon.

Dutch journalist Geert Mak  travels during a year in Europe. He narrates the story of the 20th century of every place of the continent, via the people, the places, the memories of the biggest human achievement and biggest slaughterhouse in the world, Europe. Astonishinig!

Books for Easter (1)

We used to think of the 20th century as the era of the two devastating wars, or the time of communism and nazism and their massacres. But they were also writers, scientists, painters, philosophers, musicians in this century. These people also changed the world forever and gave the most important mind creations of the modern times. The Modern Mind  is a splendid narration of the best part of the 20th, the creative one. Very stimulating reading, if you can forget the awful cover...I skipped trading in the last days to read this, 850 refreshing pages..a shower for the mind..

Carver

Spent my Sunday morning reading Raymond Carver, the biggest American writer (for me at least), who served a "minor" genre, the short story. Minimalism is the art of the clever. A superb collection of his stories  this one!..

Price patterns

Reading simultaneously two books on Technical Analysis, one good and one (very) bad. The good one is this, by Martin Pring. All you need to know about price patterns in 350 pages. A LOT of charts and diagrams, no much text or "deep" bullshit. A nice visual library you can review in one or two hours, with your coffee and good music. Because price move and patterns is all that matters. Pure geometry.

20 years

The night the Wall fell down -9/11/89- i was there, a young photographer covering the event for greek media. I will never forget some images, the East Berliners walking in the West with the eyes of children in a toy store. The happiness of freedom on the faces. The gazes of some in KaDeWe store, admiring the 1200 ham varieties. The chilled people in the night of the next day, after 12 hours walking in West Berlin with temperature around zero, with a Red Cross pot of soup in the hand..

I finished recently reading this excellent book by F.Taylor on Wall's history. You learn a lot about post-war Germany, the Cold War and the fall of communism, all in 500 pages. Fascinating.

Books for the summer (2)

2. Kazuo Ishiguro, Nocturnes. Fine short stories from a Japanese-English master.

3. William Gibson, Pattern recognition. That's all about! (but nothing to do with trading). By the Neuromancer's author.

4. Thomas Bulkowski, Trading classic chart patterns. A visual library to keep you in shape.

Books for the summer (1)

After the If this is a Man (one of the 10-15 best books I was lucky to read in my life) and the Periodic system, the third major work by the biggest Italian. Astonishing reading.

Flights of love

for Christian

Superb short stories by Bernhard Schlink, to read one every day. Among them, The circumcision, a little jewel, the best short story I have read in the last years. A young German studying in New York falls in love with a young Jewish woman living there. The deepest and most accurate portrait of newer generations in today's Germany.

Fooled, indeed

I had nice moments in the weekend with this superb book. A brilliant Lebanese cosmopolitan, Nassim Nicolas Taleb, gives a stimulating and very amusing insight on probability, business and, mostly, trading. What if our success is pure luck and no skills or hard work? The book helps everyone to take himself less seriously..

The maths of symmetry

During this week I had the time to read this fine book. Not very known as du Sautoy's first book (The Music of the primes) but very stimulating, with a lot of ideas. It explores the mathematician's quest to understand the mystery of symmetry in nature, the art and the universe, from the age of Ancient Greeks (Plato : "God ever geometrizes") to the modern era. The only problem is that the writer has an ego bigger than the egos of Gauss, Abel and von Neumann putted together... Too many I's to grasp for a maths book.. The really great minds are more humble...But the book is worth reading for the stimulation you get.

Einstein, Picasso

Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty That Causes Havoc" by Arthur I. Miller.

The best of two worlds in one book and the amazing correlations between them. Or the mystery of the highest creativity. Spendid reconstruction of Paris debut du siecle atmosphere. An excellent reading for this rainy Sunday evening.

more info here.

The gambler

Book of the week!.. lol

"At that point I ought to have gone away, but a strange sensation rose up in me, a sort of defiance of fate, and a desire to challenge it, to put out my tongue at it. I laid down the largest stake allowed-four thousand gulden-and lost it. Then, getting hot, I pulled out all I had left, staked it on the same number, and lost again, after which I walked away from the table as though I were stunned. I could not even grasp what had happened to me." Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

Stefan Zweig

for the RMIC*

A great little novel, a miniature masterpiece, by the great Viennese writer. I re-readed this today and had good time. A big story teller that Stefan. You need Zweig, Musil and Broch to feel the Mittel -Europa atmoshere of the early years of the (previous) century.


*RMIC = Rennaissance Man Ignoring Chess..

Scalping, chess, life

When I tried scalping for the first time, I was impressed by the analogy between scalping and fast chess ("blitz"). In fast chess , like in scalping, you have to act very quickly, based on intuition, experience and intelligence. There is no place for endless analysis.

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How life imitates chess is an excellent book from the former world champion, Garry Kasparov. It's not about chess, it is an easy approach of very important subjects, like decision-making, strategy development, crisis managment, intellectual evolution, game theory, perception and intuition, and so on... A lot of ideas in 270 pages and for 10 bucks.. Very inspiring.

Environment day

A beautiful book, very well written and presented, with excellent photos. Although the texts are quite deep, the reading of this book is a real pleasure. I had a splendid Sunday with it, the best book I have read in the last year. Details here.

Don't miss it.