Financial-future

Jack Schwager is a great author. He asks very intelligent questions and seems to have a deep though un-intuitive knowledge of the futures game. (See the CRT interview, overly analytical people mask intuitive traits). The William Eckhardt interview is incredible and should be re-read many times over. This interview alone is well worth the price of the book. I have one major gripe with the author however. Schwager seemed to have had a serious lapse in judgement by including some of the traders that he did. There is no doubt that all the traders interviewed in the book are of high caliber but some definetly cannot be thought of as "Market Wizards". Who am I talking about? Linda Raschke, Tom Basso, Charles Faulkner maybe even Trader Vic. Who is very underrated? Jeff Yass, the man is the best options player around. Druckenmiller, Trout, and Eckhardt are as good as it gets.These legendary names should not be sullied by the inclusion of the above mentioned traders. Schwager left out some amazing traders, what about the people at Kenzie, Niederhoffer ( I know he blew out), Louis Bacon, John Henry, Willem Kookyer and Grenville Craig? Anyone ever heard of Jullian Robertson? Please Jack, if you ever write Market Wizards 3, try to include all or even some of these people. Not traders that you speak with at "Omega" conferences.

If you don't want to spend twenty years and untold sums learning about trading by doing it yourself, learn from the experts in the time it takes to read this book. A great companion to Schwager's FUTURES series, all three should be in any trader's or wanna be trader's library. THE NEW MARKET WIZARDS has what it advertises... market wisdom.

Great read. I've read this book so many times the pages are beginning to pull from the binding.

Great read.

The reviewer that wrote the poor and misleading review described the book perfectly.

In a 4 page passage of the book I found at least 10 errors involving contradictions between text, tables and figures. This becomes very frustrating if you are trying to reproduce the results Gately achieved--a task I have found impossible.

Gately also claims great success however he does not test his neural nets on a validation set of data. This is a fatal error in real trading. It is therefor impossible to determine if he was successful at all.

It is clear that Gately does not have a background in quantitative sciences, as he has little skill in accurately and completely reporting procedures and results.

The idea of the book and the trial and error approach is good but another author should write the second edition.

About the only positive thing I can say is that he has done a good job at capturing the feel of the trial and error process that is so necessary in developing a neural network model. That said, I could write a book about what's wrong with the book. There is so much poor advice and misinformation in the book, I would scarcely know where to begin. As I read it, I literally cringed at the so-called "information" being passed on to the unaware.

His errors includes poor sampling of test data, no validation data, poor data preparation, highly correlated inputs, small sample size, basing design changes in on insignificant changes in error, etc.

The extensive bibliography may be useful to some, but I would bet my net worth that it is not a list of books he has read. If you have a copy of Azoff's book on forecasting, you will find that Gately essentially cribbed the bulk of his bibliography from Azoff. The few remaining entries were cribbed from the bibliography found in the Neuroshell literature. The book is fairly heavy with hype for the Neuroshell product. (Not that it's a bad product.)

If you're thinking of buying this, I would recommend instead Master's Practical Neural Networks in C++. Doesn't matter if you don't program, it has plenty of good text, and most importantly, sound advice.

What does this book promise?

"Succinctly explains how neural networks function, what they can accomplish as well as how to use, construct and apply them for maximum profit."

Ok, so perhaps it should say .... An introductory text with basic definitions and a example of how to use a neural network to predict the S & P 500. But even on the grander promise this book delivers. The book is too basic for those previously familiar with NNs, but perfect for someone who merely would like to begin and fears the prospect of becoming too frustrated to finish. Gately points out potential snares and discusses how to overcome them and walks the reader through a project. He describes how to preprocess the data to ensure meaningful results.

I have followed his steps and have been very please with my project, this book and the value I received when purchasing it.

A good introduction to neural nets and their applicability tothe futures markets. Provides mathematical/theoretical basis fortechniques involved in neural net training, testing, chaos and touches on nonlinear systems in general. Also provides interesting benchmarks of several nets against several time series. Great bibliography. Includes Fortran source code for running trained nets but not for training a net.