Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Having benefited significantly from his earlier two books (The Volatility Edge in Options Trading: New Technical Strategies for Investing in Unstable Markets and Trading Options at Expiration: Strategies and Models for Winning the Endgame), I was very eager to read this book - despite Augen's previous book Trading Realities: The Truth, the Lies, and the Hype In-Between was eminently forgettable. This one is mostly disappointing "book". The issue is not that there are no good ideas here - but the "book" at best has material sufficient for a decent paper in a trading journal or a week's worth of blog posts. Moreover, an entire chapter of a 3-chapter books is almost dedicated to an inane discussion on difference between database and spreadsheet and how to shift cells in Excel and date formats etc. (Reminded me of the "Hello World" program I wrote when I was learning Java). Such discussion in an already short book is quite underwhelming considering the grandiose title of the book.
However, the book is not without merit - the idea of incorporating Excel to understand day-of-the-week distortions in a security may have some utility in trading weekly options (especially combining some of the ideas from his "Expiration..." book). The discussion on possible way to predict a correction using VIX/true ratio is also interesting. Discussion on using Excel for trendlines is OK (but most readers who are interested in their own analytics probably use software that provides far more trending options). However, Augen does provide a good framework for structuring a spreadsheet to make it easier for complex analyses. If the book was advertised in that context alone, it would have been on target. Instead, the publisher/editor/author decided to market the book as "...covers a variety of approaches for systematically improving your trades by exploiting Excel's most powerful new features..". On that front, a classic example of over-promise and under-deliver.
Overall, despite some interesting thoughts, the superficial discussion on Excel and very sparse good ideas makes this a mostly below-average book..quite a far cry from his first two books. In fact Augen could have had a classic, rivaling his first book, had he combined this book with two others - Trading...expiration and Day Trading Options: Profiting from Price Distortions in Very Brief Time Frames (please my reviews for these two). This one is worth a quick read to perhaps nudge some creative thinking on your own...but dont expect much help from this book directly. Not a must-have.
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