****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
This book is "worth its weight in gold" if you are serious about trading or investing using Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). On first impression it seems like a pretty thin book (90 pages), and the heart of the material in Part III is just 30 pages. But in Part III you learn very simple, practical, back-tested rules and strategies for outperforming the market by rotating periodically to the best-performing ETFs. The book presents results (compound annual returns) from following these strategies from 1998 to 2006, ranging from 15-16% for style index rotation to 19% adding an international ETF, 20% for sector ETFs, and 26% using Fidelity sector funds. [...]The hardest thing for many traders or investors to accept may be that such simple, mechanical strategies that require monitoring the market only once every other week (with variants once per week or once per month) can perform so well. They work, for these funds better than for individual stocks, because of persistence of trends within market sectors, and styles such as value vs. growth and large-cap vs. small-cap that last even longer. Many people want to use fancy indicators, and many traders are in the market for the action and are too impatient for this approach. But if your goal is to simply make money with less risk than the overall stock market, this approach is very practical and usable.The other 60 pages of this book include an introduction to ETFs and how they work, two chapters on chart analysis -- one written by Steve Palmquist, a successful professional trader, and one where David Vomund interviews well-known trader Linda Bradford Raschke -- and a short chapter on trader psychology that presents the personal trading process used by Dr. J.D. Smith, founder of AIQ Systems. They are very worthwhile for their advice and antidotes to the traps that traders often fall into.I know David Vomund and knew Jerry Smith personally, and have met Linda Raschke and Steve Palmquist -- these are four very good people to learn from. David Vomund, the author, manages money using these strategies, and writes and presents seminars for AIQ. He is rated by Timer Digest as one of the ten best market timers for the 10-year period ending December 31, 2005, and has appeared on the cover of that publication twice in this period. But none of this seems to go to his head -- David's philosophy is pretty simple, practical, and all about making money rather than trading excitement or fame. If you actually apply these strategies, this book should literally be worth its weight (just a few ounces) in gold, and potentially quite a bit more.
