This is gonna sound hella stupid, but one of the points he made in the book that has permanently stuck itself in my head (I think it's in the preface, not sure on that) is that even without a chart, you have a 50% chance of being right.

Think about that for a moment.

You have a 50% chance of being right in any trade without any chart at all.

Now, how many traders do you think there are out there... sitting next to some very expensive computers that are running incredibly complex formulii -- and yet performing at a rate beneath that of a coin-flip?

You have a 50% chance of being right in any trade without any chart at all.

That's a fact, right there.

If its just a coin toss, why do 85 percent of traders get their clocks cleaned?

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

I decided to order this book like the rest of you, I thought Al Brooks could teach me a lot of new stuff.

Man, I am still in chapter one and it's painful. Something about his writing style is not agreeing with me. I keep feeling like these super-long paragraphs of why a bar is, could, could not, might, might not be, sometimes is, sometimes isn't, a bear or a bull bar .... ugh, I just lost my train of thought again just typing that...

I wish he had used bullet points for describing some of it instead of writing it in paragraph format.

I've learned more about doji's though in the first chapter than I ever knew before. I'm also paying more attention to up/down bars like the two in the attachment.

He's also reminded me that if it looks like "xyz", it probably will behave very similar to "xyz". Trading is not an exact science, and too many times I (we?) get caught up in looking for the perfect symmetry or perfect bar.

As Douglas Adams said:


Last, I'm also learning more about ii and iii bars. So as you can see, I am in fact learning from the book, but man, it's a tough lesson.

Are all of Al Brooks' books written like this?

Mike

I've learned more about doji's though in the first chapter than I ever knew before. I'm also paying more attention to up/down bars like the two in the attachment.

Attached is a picture of a Brooks pattern that he claims has very high reliability. In essence it is a second entry into a failed breakout of a tight trading range. So, in the attached example the 6B got into a tight range (Barb Wire as per Brooks) and gave a nice fakeout pop. When you get that first breakout you want to enter a sell stop 1 tick below the breakout bar. If it doesn't reverse you don't get executed but if it does you'll get triggered and there will be longs trapped that are looking to get out.

Blz