Trading Price Action Trends: Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Wiley Trading) [Hardcover]

If you are serious about trading, then these books by Al Brooks are the best I have read. He gives a wealth of information and insight into the psychology behind price action and how the markets work, who drives the moves and how to trade them.

I am confused as to why this book has any good reviews at all.
Pros:
1) The author clearly does know how to trade successfully.
2) He does not hold back, and freely gives his honest opinions
3) the subject matter (price action)

Cons:
1) the content is completely unstructured, and disorganized.
2) it is very difficult to read, and get much useful information from the book.
3) the images of charts are very sparse, and if you are in the kindle edition, you will be paging back many many pages to try to see what he is talking about.
4) the publisher really should have helped the author to structure the content, it feels like the publishers didn't even bother to proof read this book.
5)Al brooks does not have any idea how to describe his thoughts in a way that is useful for the reader. It is very unfortunate because he has a lot of valuable information to give, but he is not capable in giving it.

if you decide to get this book, be aware that it will require an enormous amount of effort and dedication to read and understand this book, and the benefit you gain will be minimal.

This is by far the best book on trading that I've found. I'm just starting out as a part time independent trader and have read several books about the markets and trading in general. Some are opaque, discussing crazy maths (I'm not afraid of maths, but some books really go too far when trading is supposed to be the main subject). Some are akin to a diary detailing the search to find the holy grail or create the philosopher's stone. The most helpful I've found are related to trading psychology, but psychology is only of any use if a person already knows enough to make decent trades. This book is something completely different.

The closest book that I've started reading that compares is "The Road to Reality" by Roger Penrose. In this, Penrose summarises pretty much the entire of advanced physics in a single volume. It's a heavy book, both on the mind and possibly for self defense in a pinch. Not finished it yet, but the maths really is intense...

But back to "Bar by Bar"...

This is the first book of three. Originally it was one book, but when the publisher received the manuscript and realised the book would be five inches thick, they asked Brooks to split it into three volumes. These are "Trends", "Trading Ranges" and "Reversals". References are made to the other books and it's probably intended to treat them as a single work.

Brooks really goes into depth concerning his take on the price action trading approach. Essentially, the philosophy is that every single candle on a chart is telling a part of the story of price action for that asset. Brooks uses only a 20 bar EMA (he says in a "webinar" that this is only occasionally of any use and is present more out of habit), other than this he uses clean charts in his trading. I recommend searching for some of his "webinars" on youtube for a taste of his thinking. Brooks explains the meaning behind individual bars, setups and the larger picture. Just as books explaining indicators teach how to explain the past performance of assets (past performance is no guarantee of future performance), this book tries to impart the knowledge required to understand the *present* movements of an asset.

The key here is understanding. This is no book filled with quick tips or get rich schemes. It's hard going, but so far I've massively improved my understanding and have already started making better trades on my account. I'm also actually starting to understand why they are decent calls instead of just thinking "oh, the blue line has crossed the orange line and the squiggles are above the bar chart, time to make a trade".

Others recommend a few years of trading before diving into this, but if you aren't faint-hearted, have an active mind, don't mind re-reading page after page until it sinks in and want to avoid developing an addiction to indicators, then I can highly recommend this book. The introduction alone is incredibly helpful in providing a basis for understanding, even if you later put this book down for a few months or years until you are ready to continue.

A brief warning though before you part with your money. This is a serious book. I would compare this to a late years undergraduate text book or a postgrad text book in it's depth, but if you have the imagination to visualise the story that each bar on a chart has to tell, then it doesn't require university level education to understand. A will to learn actively, self-motivation and lots of time spent annotating live charts to reinforce the concepts are pretty much essential though.