Jeff Greenblatt starts his book with a classical adagio – “The only constant is change” (Heraclit). In this respect, his book is very interesting. Because “Breakthrough Strategies to Predicting Any Market” is in equal measure a book about technical trading as well as about self-discipline.
The author begins his book by underlining what can bring you the trading success. And there is an important factor, which I liked mostly, since I applied this philosophy with a lot of success in the long years of my adult education. In order to succeed, you need the patience and the discipline of the great traders. They are the guys who will not throw themselves in the first apparently successful pattern which the fickle market can offer them. No way. Jeff Greenblatt looks like a preacher – he tells you again and again that you need patience and a lot of practice – be it years if necessary. In order to achieve great profits, Greenblatt mentioned in “Breakthrough Strategies to Predicting Any Market” that you need to forget about profits and transform trading into an ever changing pattern-spotting process. Because, if you follow only profits, greed will take over the driving seat and you will tend to ignore the signals that an (eventual) analysis can bring you.
So much about investing as an art. Because technical trading is a sort of “money engineering” for all those authors, Greenblatt makes no exception. Where he stands out of the crowd is actually the techniques he discloses. He has taken the Fibonacci and the Lucas waves and practiced them for several decades. Which, let’s face it, a few of us (earthly investors) will ever have the patience to do. So in this respect Jeff sticks to his own philosophy. And what is better, he discloses the techniques to the reader.
Another nice insight brought by “Breakthrough Strategies to Predicting Any Market” comes from the distinctive use of the charts techniques. If other traders stick to throwing lines through selected graphically plotted periods, Jeff takes a step back and looks at the pattern. If the pattern is not linear, the better – fewer investors will be able to spot it and profits will get higher in this case.
Jeff Greenblatt has began his trading career as an Elliott but then he discovered Steve Nison’s work. He moved then from waves to candlesticks, which he maintains that it is a better exemption spotting tool than a continuous pattern. Arguably indeed, yet the arguments that he presents are relatively compelling. What I appreciated in the book was the extensive comparison of the various months of the year for various trades. He cannot offer any relationship for the year (noone can), yet the method looks interesting and can really help with your timing of the trades.
To deserve its name, “Breakthrough Strategies to Predicting Any Market” must review all the markets where these strategies are applicable. And Jeff does it – he reviews the forex markets, the shares ones and has even some considerations on indices. It is not a pure classical review of the characteristics of those markets, but rather an insightful one, with a couple of relevant points for each type of markets.
What I did not like so much was (as for most of these trading book) the focus on the trading history rather than on the future. Of course, if one would have such a tool to forecast the immediate future for one share or currency, he/she would just trade his way to a fortune, not disclose it in a book. However, the book’s interesting and well written. So have fun reading it…
Final note – As you can see, I tried to do this review impartially (not as a commercial). Should you like to read the book, please try this Amazon link – you will pay the same price whilst a small referral fee will help sustain this investment blog. Thank you for your choice!:
