Optimize Your Trading Edge: Increase Profits, Reduce Draw-Downs, and Eliminate Leaks in Your Trading Strategy

By Bo Yoder

You can't profit without an edge

Without an edge, the costs of trading will cause you to lose money over the long haul. In order to gain an edge in trading, you must find a statistical advantage within a market. And the best edges come from market shifts fueled by a trader's psychology. In Optimize Your Trading Edge, investing expert Bo Yoder provides traders in every market with the insight needed to hone their current trading strategies with edge analysis.

Optimize Your Trading Edge explains the important dynamics of statistical probability and how it applies to the unpredictability of the financial markets caused by human behavior--that is, cognitive biases. This essential guide shows you how to evaluate the profit expectations of a specific trading strategy and fine-tune that plan to best exploit its market edge. Discover what successful traders have achieved through edge analysis:

Increased earningsReduced draw downs resulting in greater, low-risk leveragingA keener eye for finding and ending profit leaksPrecision timing for trading a setup

Bo Yoder has taught thousands of traders worldwide in equities, futures, and foreign exchange markets how to increase profitability and optimize their edge regardless of the market environment. By making trading decisions based on statistical probability, you can trade with more confidence, control, and aptitude. Through clear explanations and real-world examples, you'll learn the valued secret of "trading smarter, not harder," and with the wealth of practical worksheets inside, you'll have all the tools you need to incorporate this proven method into your trading strategy.

Understanding market movement and the cognitive biases driving them is a critical skill of the profitable investor. To gain a real edge, traders must determine their probability of success in any given market. Optimize Your Trading Edge delivers the methods and tools that will become an essential part of your trading arsenal.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 007149846X
• ISBN13: 9780071498463
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Companies
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Essential reading

Excellent. For those who have not had their `eureka' moment in trading yet, this book should do it. If you don't find yourself saying, "Wow! Is that all there is to trading profitably", start over and read it again. The book might be more appropriately titled `discovering your edge', rather than `optimizing'. The first seven chapters are very good; there is a little filler material at the end. This is a short book, because the secret to successful trading is pretty simple and does not require a massive tome. Only a handful of published `trading' books explain that successful trading is all about using a tested edge with correct position sizing and risk control, this is one of them. Yoder knows the subject and writes well. Successful traders will probably not find anything new here, but sometimes it's nice to reinforce your thinking from a fresh source. I'm deducting one star because he does succumb to including some chart setups, which are an unnecessary distraction from the main message.

Very good book

In my humble opinion this book is one of the best books about "successful" trading. The authors explains in detail that a favorable risk/reward ratio and not a special setup is the key to making money. Two or three things are surely rehashed from the author's previous book, but I like his latest book much more.

the best advice

Although the initial reviewer is right in a sense, there is material covered in his first book, Mr Yoder is one of only a handful of authors who write about truly relevant issues in trading. Risk to reward issues, trade management, having a trading plan are the keys to success. Most books focus on trading set-ups with no discussion of the probabilities involved etc. We all have to do our own research to find the type of set-ups that are comfortable for us to trade. There is no escaping it, if you want to profit you have to do your own studies to determine proper rsk/reward strategies according to how often your desired set-up succeeds. His advice is exactly what the title implies. He imparts the reality of how traders really make money in the markets. Not with big hit trades, but rather with consistent set-ups , proper risk/reward and scaling up as the account increases. Want to make 200,000 a year trading? Then you need to be risking roughly 2000 a trade, which takes roughly a 100k account. He's worth a read.