Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Guppy is probably the most high profile trading guru in Australia, with a huge following and a couple of shameless imitators. Although his writing tends to waffle a bit, his passion for trading is infectious and I credit him with awakening my interest in technical analysis. His books are generally a good read, and many of his ideas on money management, etc are sound. But I have mixed feelings about his influence on my trading. Unfortunately, I spent three years trying and failing to implement his methods successfully. Apparently others have been more successful, and I wouldn't be surprised if Guppy himself is a genuinely successful trader. However, any success of his must depend at least as much on his innate ability to read the markets as on the quality of his trading systems - which, frankly, are terrible. Anyone seeking to emulate Guppy's success by using his techniques would need a similarly innate understanding of when to deviate from the system at just the right time. Although Guppy uses a number of ideas in his trading, his core trend trading techniques involve the use of trend lines, the Count Back Line, Guppy Multiple Moving Averages and a basic 10ema/30ema crossover system. I've tested all these systems thoroughly using TradeSim, in various combinations on thousands of stocks over 20 years of data. They're hopeless. Even in a roaring bull market they perform only adequately. You'd need a whole lot of discretion to get them to perform as well as he claims they work in his newsletter. I was a subscriber to his newsletter for two years. Some cheating (or some egregious errors at the very least) boosted the performance figures in his newsletter. Back then I was a novice trader, and I found his exit techniques very confusing. I counted at least 8 different exit methods - the worst one being just a gut feeling that he'd made enough profit. It took me a long time to realize that this was all symptomatic of his sloppy approach, not just my inability to understand him. His understanding and use of statistics is especially poor. After three depressing years, I turned in desperation to other authors, Eventually I found Stan Weinstein, and his longer term system proved much more robust and profitable. My results turned around overnight - and dramatically. Since then my systems have evolved a great deal, but at their core are still the ideas formulated by authors such as Weinstein, Covel and Colin Nicholson (among many others). In conclusion, I would warn all novice traders to stay away from Guppy's subjective and convoluted systems. Instead, I would recommend "The Aggressive Investor" by Colin Nicholson, but only as a starting point.