Electronic Day Traders' Secrets: Learn from the Best of the Best Day Traders
Book Details
- Author: Marc Friedfertig and George West with Jonathan Burton
- Categories: Day Trading
Quick Summary
Friedfertig and West interview elite electronic day traders to reveal their strategies, risk management techniques, and psychological approaches, providing a profile-based guide to the methods used by the most successful practitioners in the emerging world of electronic direct-access trading.
Detailed Summary
"Electronic Day Traders' Secrets" by Marc Friedfertig and George West with Jonathan Burton, published by McGraw-Hill in 1999, captures the strategies and insights of top electronic day traders at a pivotal moment in market history -- the late 1990s explosion of direct-access electronic trading that transformed how individual traders interacted with financial markets.
The book is structured as a series of in-depth profiles of elite day traders, each revealing their specific approaches to market analysis, trade execution, and risk management. The profiles begin with "The New Trading Elite" chapter that sets the context for the electronic trading revolution, and then proceed through individual trader interviews including Andrew Friis and others who represent the best practitioners of this emerging discipline.
Each profile explores the trader's background, how they developed their methodology, their specific strategies for identifying and executing intraday trades, and their approaches to managing the intense psychological demands of full-time day trading. The book captures a diversity of approaches -- some traders focus on momentum, others on mean reversion, some rely heavily on Level II quotes and order flow, while others emphasize chart patterns and technical indicators.
The historical context is significant: the book was published during the final year of the dot-com bubble, when electronic trading was democratizing market access and creating a new class of independent traders. The traders profiled had adapted to the direct-access platforms that gave them execution speed and transparency previously available only to exchange floor traders and institutional desks.
Common themes emerge across the profiles despite the diversity of specific methods: the importance of strict risk management and loss limits, the need for emotional discipline, the value of specializing in a limited number of setups rather than trying to trade everything, and the recognition that consistent profitability requires treating day trading as a serious professional endeavor rather than casual speculation.
