The problem I have with Al Brooks is he's never publicly stated how much he's made in the markets (or at least not to my knowledge). O'Neil and Darvas are/were confirmed market millionaires.
Plus, some of the stuff Al Brooks teaches you like buy on pullback near MA could get you killed... You just have to take my word for it, ALL bullish setups in the markets (where you buy as the price breakouts) are either an O'Neil or Darvas setup 100%. I've never seen anything else! There is the third type where you buy at a new 6-month low, essentially bottom fishing. That stuff nobody has ever taught in a book yet and one I'm only beginning to understand.
(P.S.: The only thing I've ever used in my trading strategy that originated from Brooks is to look at the MA20 only while ignoring all other indicators. Even then I hardly pay attention to this line but rather the candlesticks!)
Its funny because Brooks also says that if you can make 1 ES point a day, then you can trade 100 contracts, and extrapolating, I think he shows the math of how you can make 1 million a year. But my god, 100 ES contracts... are you kidding me to only make 1 point? So its hard to really put 100% faith in this. If he is actually doing this, he should say so, and if he is just showing the math of how this could work, how can we believe anything else he says?
In fact, I think its difficult to have any faith in what anyone is saying because nobody is showing the complete picture. I highly doubt Brooks is trading 100 contracts hoping to make 1 point, but of course given extraordinary analysis, he clearly knows something... but why he would give out advice like this is beyond me.
The other thing is that all of these things shown are very market dependent. Yes, price action seems to all look the same, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of entry, stop, and exit, this changes greatly for the market, and also perhaps even for the day. These past few days are of course a perfect example where if ordinarily my screen might be set up to be 30 NQ points wide, I now have to compress it 5 times to allow for viewing 150 point trends!!!
So my point is that all of these books, as great as they are, only get so far. They all offer great ideas, but they are just ideas. Even if someone says they are going to buy the low of the day if price ever gets down there again.. what does this mean? Do they have a limit order to go long at exactly 4200.25 as an example? What if we come within 1 point of this level before reversing. Does this mean they didn't get in? Are they looking for some type of action to get in when close to this level? And what does close even mean? Perhaps they buy above the first 1 min bar that comes within 1 point of the LOD? What a stop.. where will that be? So even saying that someone is gonna buy the LOD is too arbitrary of a comment.
I know that Brooks goes into quite a bit of detail, but many of these other books I don't think do. Now I'm not suggesting that they should actually give you a tick by tick play book, but taking an idea and then actually making it work is actually just as hard as having an idea to begin with.
Anyway, my point is that unless you find someone who you can literally follow, even to the bathroom when they take a break.. LOL... it will be difficult to learn enough from them. NoDoji does have the right idea because she is very precise with what you need to see, but so much of this other advice doesn't come close enough for my liking. None of it might be bad, but its just not specific enough so you will ultimately have to build your own specifics.
