Winning the Day Trading Game: Lessons and Techniques from a Lifetime of Trading

by Thomas L. Busby and Patsy Busby Dow

Book Overview

Take a proven approach to short-term trading. Winning the Day Trading Game offers an insider's view of the trading life and provides proven strategies for profitable trading. Professional trader Tom Busby explains how the strategies that made him so much money early on in his career ultimately failed during the 1987 stock market crash and then reveals how he reinvented himself as a high-percentage day trader. He interweaves personal experiences with technical explanations to outline the cornerstones of his technique. In highlighting his own trading experiences, Busby clearly explains how to beat the market by balancing the impulses of greed and fear, managing risk at all times; and taking responsibility for your trading. Thomas L. Busby (Mobile, AL) has been a professional trader and broker for 25 years, working with Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney. He founded the Day Trading Institute in 1996 and it has grown into one of the most successful trading schools in the world.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471738239
• ISBN13: 9780471738237
• Release Date: December 2005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Convinced me to drive 15 hours to meet author

I have read all the classics and new books on investing and trading techniques. This is the first time a book, by reading only the first chapter, convinced me I needed to go meet the author. This author, Tom Busby, is unlike so many other authors in that he practices what he teaches on his trading school's Web site daily. I'm a skeptic. When I listen to their chat and see EXACTLY what they recommend trading, then I look at Busby's track record which is online for ALL TO SEE at the end of each day, I knew this wasn't a guy who hid but one who made public every trade he tells the world to do in his trading school's daily chat session. The chat session USES THE TECHNIQUES HE TEACHES IN THIS BOOK. Once I read the first chapter, I called to learn more about their school. Once I sat in the free 3-day chat session trial, I finished the book. Once I finished the book I immediately signed up for a course at his trading school. It's because he truly does teach the "art" of trading as promised, but that art is based on more than a decade of knowing how (and when) to approach each trading situation and read it like a pro. If all you do is read this book, you will be a better trader. I challenge you to stop there though. I didn't. I have nothing to gain by trying to convince you to get this book. I'd say, buy this book if you are a skeptic and only buy traders who not only practice what they teach but are open to telling others each and every technique they do. Tom Busby bares all here. I'm a better trader - and more profitable - because of Tom Busby. And I never knew about his trading school or techniques until Chapter 1 hooked me into finishing this now-classic text.

Trading Insights from a Long-Time Pro

I enjoyed Tom Busby's book on trading so much that I wrote a review for my Trader's U e-letter (found at investmentu-dot-com). Here are some exerpts from that review. Tom Busby is an experienced trader who has a lot to teach us from his years of trading. And I'd like to highlight three great lessons from his book that all traders and investors can apply. Tom Busby has had extremely useful experiences in his 25 years as a trader. He went from booming success to painful crash, and back to booming success. The progression that Tom took as a trader is a familiar one for those of us who have read the stories of other top traders - he paid his dues to learn the ropes of the trading game and became very successful. But his successes led to complacency, especially with regard to risk management. And on Black Monday (October 19, 1987), he had a huge unhedged option position that eventually cost him everything he had - house, car, the works. Busby bounced back, both psychologically and materially, from that blowout loss. Even by itself, the story of how he regained his confidence to trade makes his book worth reading. Fortunately, there are other good lessons in the book as well. Three Valuable Investing Lessons from Tom Busby 1. Manage risk first, and the rewards will come. I know that we have talked about this many times in Trader's U. But Tom's poignant personal stories help drive home the point and etch it in our brains. Since his Black Monday collapse, Tom has incorporated a wide range of risk management tools in his own trading and recommends them for his students. There are some standard, well-known tools, like using protective stop losses, but Tom also has some twists on managing risk. 2. Importance of the yearly opening price. Busby puts a lot of emphasis on the yearly opening price for any instrument he trades, whether it's an index future, a commodity or a stock. When an instrument is trading above its yearly opening price, this is bullish in the big picture. And when the price is below the yearly opening price, this is a bearish indicator. 3. Study a market and know its characteristics before you trade or invest in it. This is a very common sense item, but it is amazing how many people ignore this simple rule. Many people act on a piece of news and never even look at the key points about the stock or commodity before buying it. Some great questions to that Tom asks are: What is the daily range? Is this a volatile or well-behaved instrument? What moving averages does this instrument "respect"? In other words, what moving average does it follow in up-trends and down-trends? Despite the fact that it is a day trading book, I recommend it for all traders and investors because: It allows us to peer into the mind of a successful trader It has many concepts that are useful regardless of your trading time frame In the strategy section, it has useful tactics for managing your mutual fund portfolio and longer-term trades i

It's simply one of the BEST trading books I've ever read!

No matter whether you are a novice or a seasoned veteran of the markets Winning the Day Trading Game ... by Thomas Busby this is a must read book that offers the reader many very useful ideas and insights into what it takes to become consistently successful day trading. This book is packed with easy to understand, simple to use, and practical application concepts on some very critical points that other books often lack concerning what to know BEFORE each trading day begins. For those of you who are serious about your trading and for those who want to know what it takes to succeed in your trading business, you will do yourself a huge favor by reading this book. All this knowledge comes from a man with 25 years of experience in the business and more importantly, from someone who himself actively trades and has a desire to share his lessons and techniques in life with others so they may also be a winner.

Winning the Day Trading Game: Lessons and Techniques from a Lifetime of Trading

Busby has done a fine job in taking his 30 plus years of trading experience and presenting everything in easy to read, story- like fashion so that the book is enjoyable and understandable from cover to cover. Rather than the lugubrious numbers and analytics which so many 'trading books' bore us to tears with, this book uses metaphor to teach, which we all recognize as a better way to learn. As a trader of several years, with a fair library, this is the first time I have asked my wife to read one of my 'trading books' so that she might get a better underestanding of what goes into trading and into a trader's mind. She also loved it . Now, I am anxious to begin my second time through the book so I can pull even more 'pearls of wisdom' from it. At first glance, it looks almost too thin and too easy to be as powerful as it is. Do not let the enjoyable story within its cover keep the message from hitting home and soaking in...here is someone that has "figured it out", on a day to day basis, and is willing to share it with, and teach it to his readers. Already, I have taken sigificant lessons and translated them into profits. Specifically, I have isolated certain times in the GLOBAL trading day that allow me to concentrate my daily efforts to maximize when the markets will give me the best opportunity for a move. The best way for me to explain how imoprtant I believe this book is for traders of all levels is to tell you that it gets a definite 5 Stars in my mind! John Atkins

A Pro Shares his Insights

Personal to the point of being colloquial, Tom Busby's new book gives you the sense that you're sitting across the table from someone over coffee, someone who is willing to share the hard-won insights and knowledge of a successful lifetime trading career. No less methodical or comprehensive for being informally written, not be mention being relatively brief (about 175 pages), you won't get through it in a day or two-or at least you'd short-change yourself if you tried. I usually highlight key passages in books like this for later review; but I stopped half way through the 3rd chapter since I was essentially turning the entire book yellow. Fortunately the "information" sections are interspaced with frequent examples, some from the markets and some from Busby's personal life. You won't find any fluff here. Busby begins his book with a brief story of personal loss, the Crash of '87, in which he was both financially and psychologically ruined, and of his subsequent epiphany and redemption, the successful trading method he developed and parlayed into an even more profitable trading career. The description and explanation of this method forms the basis for the remainder of the book. After the personal introductory narration he begins by describing the three core elements of his method, which he calls Time, Key Numbers and his Indicators, which he has collected and coded in software called the RoadMap. This is not, however, a self-congratulatory vanity "infomercial" from someone who is trying to sell a product. Except for a couple of specific proprietary indicators which he developed and only occasionally mentions here, everything Busby describes is essentially generic and off-the-shelf in almost any trading software product. What he repeatedly emphasizes and what lies at the heart of his method is a conceptual understanding of the global structure of the marketplace, its habit-driven repetitive nature, the importance of identifying the "Big Picture" and of correctly aligning yourself within that ("Long, Short or Out?"), the recognition of certain key numbers that are repetitively "favored" by the market (you'll have to read the book) and the necessity of follow-through support by other markets and market internals. He tells you, in specific practical ways, how to pull all of these things together, or at least how he does it. Yes, he'll do it better than you or I. But the book is aimed, it seems, at the "generalist" trader and trading student, who might benefit from a unified, comprehensive understanding of market activity and how he or she can profit from that knowledge. Busby doesn't neglect or disparage "accepted wisdom." You'll find here all of the time-honored truisms that have been expounded by other trading teachers and coaches down through the decades. What Busby does, and does so well, is to integrate those first order principles into the logic and design of his trading method itself. Trade the method, he seems to