The Book that changed my trading ........

[Evilgoat]

I found myself in the first year of trading breaking
the rules that I had set out to follow - moving
stop losses to try and let a position breath, taking
profits to early & not using my filtering rules.

The book that changed everything for me was Way
of the Turtle by the most successful of the Turtles
Curtis Faith.

that's funny because I just went out and got his latest book "inside the mind of the turtles" today I'll have to get "way of the turtle" now

 

[charliechan]

has anyone ever traded or tested the turtle method with recent data? if so, does it produce good results still? I imagine with the recent activity in commodity markets it could be worth a look?...

(do a google if you want the rules - free pdf)

 

[meanreversion]

It really depends when your start date is. For example, many trend following funds are flat to down this year, despite some large trends. This is because coming into 2009, the overall trend for the USD was very much up. As such, Turtle rules would have you buying breakout highs of the USD (which would then get stopped out when the USD started to weaken). The big downtrend in the USD didn't properly take hold until the second half of the year, at which point trend following would start to make some money back.

Gold by itself would have performed very well. For example, plot the highest high for the last 20 days and the lowest low for the last 20 days on a graph of gold.. you will see a breakout buy signal in July around 950. Since then, gold has not touched the lower channel line, i.e. you would still be in the trade today (gold is now 1215+).