Beating the Financial Futures Market: Combining Small Biases Into Powerful Money Making Strategies

This book is full of good ideas, also none of these are new. The author's excellent work in back testing all the ideas in this book deserves praise. THE BOOK IS GOOD VALUE.

This book takes 10 biases, explains their reasoning and gives quantitative back-up for how each does in a Tradestation simulated back-test. Art is a successful mechanical trader so you get a look into how he thinks and how he interprets the results. Each bias is relatively simple and demonstrated to have a small but definable edge across multiple markets. The aspect to this book that is most interesting is how to integrate these various small biases into a master composite 'index'. As Bob Pardo writes in the Foreward section of this book "indexing can be very powerful... It can be a very effective way to 'summarize' large amounts of complex information." I find that if I can take just 1 or 2 practical ideas from a book, it is a good book. This book did more than that -- it got me started on 'indexing' for individual stock lists and sparking new directions for me. I highly recommend this book to anyone -- but especially those with some kind of competence in quantitative methods to trading.

It's interesting how simple Art Collins' systems are, and yet, if we can believe his results, they produce impressive profits anyway. There's no reason to doubt them: Art not only offers verbal assurances, he invites us to test against his results for ourselves. He fully discloses every necessary rule and formula along the way. Some of this book might be hard for neophytes to follow, but with a little work, there should be plenty within the text that's workable for everyone. Maybe one of the best books of this type I've ever read.

There are two things I love about this book. One, the author backs every contention with historic performance summaries. How many investment books do that-like maybe one in a thousand? Second, you just know the author's expertise is genuine. Read Art Collins' daily commentaries for Elite Trader and Tiger Shark, or any of his magazine articles. He earns his living trading-he's therefore, unlike most self-appointed gurus, actually walking the walk. This is really exciting stuff! I've already started testing his ideas on my own.