First of all, I should say that I am a convert from buy and hold to short term trading, and I have a lot to learn. This book, while expensive is worth the price if you are less than one year into short term trading.The book is clearly written and includes excellent graphics to illustrate the authors setups. The 3 page chapter on "Stock Selection" was worth the price of the whole book for me. Mr. Landry clearly lists the 8 conditions that he uses to build his "universe". For me, this reduced my daily downloads of 8000 stocks, to about 400.
The chapter on trend qualifiers, an important prerequisite to using his setups, is very good. It covers ADX, gaps, closes and moving averages. Because of the importance of ADX (Average Directional Movement Index), a more detailed discussion was included by the author in the Appendix.
The chapter on on basic pullbacks, is also excellent and he gives clear setups for both longs and shorts.
In following chapters, Mr. Landry provides another 6 setups which he uses with clear examples for longs and shorts. All the setups can be easily programmed in TC2000, or most other charting, software packages.
His clear setup rules are refreshing, in that so many books of this genre, are poorly written and difficult to mechanize.
The chapter on Volatility, helped me to understand this concept, but more importantly, Mr. Landry provides clear and easy to deploy rules for using volatility. He also includes a chapter on Market Timing which provides 4 indicators that he uses to determine market bias.
The chapters on Trader's Psychology and Lessons Learned are easy to read and to the point.
All in all, I find this book to be one of the best I have read and I refer to it often. Mr. Landry states that the book represents how he trades and which setups he uses and does this in a refreshing way that is easy to understand.
Now the limitations, in my humble opinion. First, his style of swing trading depends strongly on trending stocks. The setups will not work in a trading / choppy market. He states this up front, but if you are searching for mechanical trading systems, it is most important to understant that most setups that work in trending markets do not work in choppy / trading markets, and visa versa.
Second, I was suprised that the author did not include any backtesting results for the setups. While backtesting is prone to many issues, the fact that he uses top down screens to ascertain market bias conditions before entering his trades, should have made any backtesting fairly reliable.
Finally, I believe his entry points (usually 1/16 above or below the trigger, is pehaps too small and prone to whiplash in today's volatile markets. I am using a slightly wider increment based on the specific stocks average daily range.
I am glad I bought this book. You can also learn more about Mr. Landry on TradingMarkets.com, where you can sign up for a one week free trial of his daily setups. The site is also a great resource for trading information in general.
One final note. The book is published in 8 1/2 by 11 inch page format, with large fonts and lots of white space. I found this to be like an instruction manual, and it enhances the ease to read as well as frequent referral and review. A small point, but a very nice touch.
Mr. Landry sets a good foundation in learning some basic setups and to understand the momentum of the market. His techiques are a little on the conservative side, and as another reviewer wrote, "a bit outdated". Buying breakouts off of basically pennant type formations, isn't really anything new. Although his emphasis on money managment still holds validity.For futures traders, his approach is based on trend trading techniques. Again, while this is fundamentally true, it's not really swing trading. Swing trading is utilizing the momentum and volatility in whichever direction the market goes, not in one certain direction. By utilizing momentum combined with price patterns, you limit your losses, while positioning yourself in the direction of the most probable way the market may swing. I can understand short selling equities and short selling futures is a little different, but if you can only position yourself in one direction, whether equities or futures, then your really aren't swing trading.
He gives examples of short selling, but again, it's more based on the trend of the market and trend has nothing to do with swing trading.
Futures traders will find that "Street Smarts" by Linda Bradford Rashke and Laurence Conners (published by the same company) is a more realistic view on how swing trading is done.
