Rating: - Vastly Overrated
If you have any interest in learning how to use a trend following methodology - or even how trend following really works - you should look elsewhere. Nothing in this book is applicable beyond a brief chart in the last third that explains support and resistance. While I do not agree with the position that trend following is dead, overrated, or otherwise worth ignoring, this book most assuredly is worth ignoring. What little it offers in practical advice can be found in many better, less expensive books on basic technical trading.

---

Rating: - Trend Hype
I read this book and I must say that I liked it but it really was just a bunch of hype as to why you should be a trend follower. Everyone in the trading business knows that the trend is your friend. Most have heard of the Turtles and know that trend following can be a great way to make money trading. But what this book doesn't address is how to trend follow. It talks alot about the money managers that do trend follow, but nothing about how, which the title of the book implies. It says "How" but fails to address "How" other then to say these guys are trend followers and you should be too. I would say the title is a little misleading. The title should be , "These Great Traders Make Money by Trend Following". So if you want to learn the "how to" then just forget this book as it will give little insight into that.

---

Rating: - So Far So Good
This book is not as good as I expected. It talks much about the trading records and philsophy of the great trend following winners. However, only few pages out of the 400+ pages are about how to build trading system. It seems that the author is trying to ask the readers to attend his trading courses. This is skeptical to me because I do not learn anything how to trade in practice after reading this book.

---

Rating: - A tribute to the greatness of his best friends BIll Dunn and John Henry
OK this is a book that mostly argues how good the trend following methodology is compared to any other method used by fund managers. Doesnt really adress the individual trader, but focuses on comparing the returns of a few trend following fund managers that have been successful.

IN particular he seems to be in love with John Henry and Bill Dunn who must be paying a commission to Covel each time he mentions their names or gives them praise as to how they managed to somehow make a 36.5% return one year when the index was down 10%.

Filled with stats like these, which to me are quite meaningless as i dont need to see 10 pages with his monthly returns and whole pages deicated to tables that show the weighting of certain types of markets he trades. Also it is somewhat contradictory when his makes the point to emphasize that quarterly returns and for that matter yearly returns are not very good indicators of true performance, as he states absolute returns are the only thing that should matter.

OK that is fair enough but when he makes a point of showing how these trend followers are so much better than what other people are doing he uses monthly returns against a benchmark index! I know this is only trivial but it made it more apparant to me that this book wasnt really on how you might trade trends but a complete argument on 'why' theoretically it is the best method and how he can prove this with stats.

Don't get me wrong it is a good book for anyone wanting a more indepth understanding of the subject and does argue it fairly convincingly, but it is very subjective in how he has presented the argument and will not benefit anyone who is looking to this book to give them any information on maybe how to identify trends or for that matter trade trends.

There is one example in the appendix but the rules are almost laughable, based on very loose rules to determine being in and out of the trend and giving a hell of a lot back when exiting.


Also before i go i must point out that he is claiming these traders, henry and Dunn, to be the top traders around and how their returns of 29% annually is the best around. Therefore since they use trend following it must be the best method. Well no, these 2 are very good but there are many around like them achieving returns even better than them in a lot of cases using fundamental data. But he decided to compare them with just the ordinary benchmarks which he contradictorily seemed to hate so much.

good book none the less

---

Rating: - bad bad bad too bad
4 thumbs down, way down.

this is a bad book, the writer tries to convince you with his statistics while he doesn't know statistics.