Trading Against the Crowd: Profiting from Fear and Greed in Stock, Futures, and Options Markets

225 Pages·2004·3.01 MB·English

by  John F. Summa

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Trading
Against
the Crowd
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John Wiley & Sons
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Trading
Against
the Crowd
Profiting from Fear and Greed
in Stock, Futures,
and Options Markets
JOHN SUMMA
John Wiley &Sons, Inc.
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Copyright © 2004. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans-
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ISBN: 0-471-47121-6
Printed in the United States of America.
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For Lisa
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The efficient markets theoryasserts that all financial prices
accurately reflect all public information at all times. In other
words, financial assets are always priced correctly, given
what is publicly known, at all times. Price may appearto be
too high or too low at times, but, according to the efficient
markets theory, this appearance must be an illusion.
—Robert J. Shiller
From Irrational Exuberance
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Acknowledgments
T
his book could not have been written without the influence of
earlier books that explored the role psychology plays in market
price behavior long before I took up the quest. These include John
Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory, Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Humphrey B. Neill’s The
Art of Contrary Thinking, Norman Fosback’s Market Logic, and Robert J.
Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance, to name only a few. I am indebted to these
authors and their pioneering work.
I want to thank Pamela van Giessen of John Wiley & Sons for giving me
the opportunity to make my own contribution to this tradition, as well as
Lara Murphy and Jennifer MacDonald at Wiley for their professional han-
dling of all my editorial concerns.
Also, I would like to express my gratitude for the superb copyediting
done by Matthew Kushinka of PV&M Publishing Solutions, and the skillful
translation of MetaStock code into TradeStation code by Ron Hudson.
While there were many other persons who helped me with this project,
I would like especially to thank Lorie Meg Karlin of Managed Capital Advi-
sory Group, Ltd. for her generous support during the final writing stages. I
am also grateful to Bertrand Desruelles, Paltamas Gordon, Lisa Hardy, and
John Sarich for their encouragement and valuable input at various stages of
this project.
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