I have purchased and read this book and therefore this review is written by someone who has actually experienced it!

On a whole, this is a must read for beginner traders. Books like "Trading for a living" and "Coming to my trading room" (By Mr Elder) are written excellent on the fundamentals, but they provide little access to how real market professionals think and act. On the other hand, although this book touches little on fundamentals, this provide a very good entry point for beginners to model the beliefs of the pros apply the basics for higher level.

On the negative side, several lousy attempts are made to encourage users to sign up for some of the paid services these professionals offered on the Internet. Don't get me wrong that I downgrading those services offered! But I believe a book should be written more on the "how it works" rather than just throwing you a bunch of methods to you.

I got great ideas from this book overall! (I created a software tool that now serves one of the screen in my trade selection), but I believe it could be better for a 250+ pages book. Don't expect to learn a whole new way of trading from this book, but some useful tips from it might make you a better trader.

This is a great book in that it teaches concepts you hear about all the time, but it takes the time to spell them out, and provide examples.

One of the few investing books I have actually learned from. Highly recommended.

Brilliant!Apart from chapter 3 and 4 of this 6 chapter book where 3 is weighed down by one mans seemingly complicated approach to stock selection and 4 being a plug for anothers trading system.
1: Tech , explains in great depth the relation between price and volume, and several swing paterns.
5, 6 Vital info discussing the how and why relevant of macroeconomics
and how to go about determining the mac env of any given time.
Must read for short term traders looking for something relevant with some substance.

I have read tons of books on trading that left me nothing or too little, this is one of the very few books in which I found easy concepts that produced me money.

I have read tons of books on trading that left me nothing or too little, this is one of the very few books in which I found easy concepts that produced me money.

I don't understand the negative reviews. This book contains many useful, tradeable concepts. Don't expect any book to give you a complete system. Part of the job of being a trader is system development and tweaking to market conditions. There is much to be learned here. Particularly useful is the overview of chart patters in the first chapter. There are excellent explanations of why these patterns occur and what they mean, along with suggestions for how to trade them.

Wonderful book! The very first chapter by Terry Bedford is an excellent, easy to read, chapter on technical analysis applied to the top 10 or most common technical patters that all traders confront, regardless of their time frame. Erlanger's chp on indicators is also very useful, again for beginner day & swing traders. The best part of this book is its easy to read style. The middle chapters are also useful for stock traders who are a little bit more advanced. I am a futures trader and use the book as a desk top reference for trading patterns. For other traders, I found it to be a nice supplement to John Murphy's TA book. But for struggling beginners & intermediates I strongly recommend this book.

Wonderful book! The very first chapter by Terry Bedford is an excellent, easy to read, chapter on technical analysis applied to the top 10 or most common technical patters that all traders confront, regardless of their time frame. Erlanger's chp on indicators is also very useful, again for beginner day & swing traders. The best part of this book is its easy to read style. The middle chapters are also useful for stock traders who are a little bit more advanced. I am a futures trader and use the book as a desk top reference for trading patterns. For other traders, I found it to be a nice supplement to John Murphy's TA book. But for struggling beginners & intermediates I strongly recommend this book.

This book will not teach to how to become a swing trader or improve your swing trading skills. Of all the books on trading that I have seen, there is only one that truly addresses swing trading from a market professional's viewpoint - "W. D. Gann - A treasure rediscovered [WDGATR]," by Robert Krause. Although the price of "WDGATR" appears to be a high $170, the methodology is sound. In my opinion, "WDGATR" is priced substantially under its true value. Markman's work is overpriced at a penny!

I bought this book because of the first chapter as it gave the human actions and emotions behind chart patterns - the rest is not worth bothering about in my view.

I came to this book with positive expectations, and I wasn't disappointed. Jon Markman is a market researcher and a professional trader, so he has the all-too-rare advantage among writers of trading texts of actually knowing his subject matter. Equally important, however, he is an accomplished financial journalist whose contributions have regularly graced the MSN Money/CNBC site. Having worked with Jon on a number of columns for the site, I can vouch for the seriousness and integrity of his commitment to financial journalism. Before reading Swing Trading, I knew that it would be refreshingly free of hype, self-promotion, and the kinds of misleading presentations so common in the trading world.

The format of the book calls to mind Jack Schwager's classic Market Wizards books, as each chapter is devoted to an exemplary practitioner of swing trading. There the analogy ends, however. While the chapters do include interesting personal details about the traders, they are not transcripts of interviews. Rather, they are attempts to capture the swing trading styles of each of the subjects, describe the styles in down-to-earth terms, and illustrate them with copious examples. The result is a fascinating potpourri of approaches to trading the markets over periods ranging from days to months.

The potpourri includes charting methods from Terry Bedford, trend-following techniques from Bert Dohmen, momentum-based strategies from George Fontanills, Markman's own work with the StockScouter ranking system and HiMARQ seasonality patterns, Richard Rhodes' macroeconomic approach, and the sentiment-based work of Phil Erlanger. Each chapter attempts to show readers how they can duplicate the traders' work for themselves using readily available web-based charting and screening tools. The chapters also summarize trading rules from the pros that capture useful advice for both rookie and seasoned traders.

It is this practical aspect of the book that makes it stand out from its peers. The chapter on Bedford, for example, not only delineates chart patterns, but details methods for determining profit targets and setting stops to reduce losses. In the Fontanills chapter, Markman details how to zero in on high momentum stocks using MSN Money charts and Excel spreadsheets. His own chapter contains very useful hints on combining parameters in the StockScouter system, such as sector strength and market cap, to identify strong and weak stocks over short swing periods. Any of these ideas is more than you'd get from the average high-priced trading seminar.

If I have one reservation about Swing Trading is that we don't hear more from Markman-the-journalist at the end of the book. A final chapter, integrating the material and drawing common themes from the book's subjects, would have be informative and useful for readers who want to adapt the material to their own trading styles. My sense is that the common threads are present: each of the traders profiled has immersed themselves in market patterns, researched these thoroughly, and found ways of framing trades as hypotheses based upon these patterns. By firmly grounding each trade in a well-defined pattern, the traders readily recognize when positions are not yielding expected results and exit without undue damage to their equity.

Reading this book for the methods of entry but also the risk management and exits will yield insights even for more active, intraday traders. Swing Trading is a worthy complement to Markman's equally useful book Online Investing.