Evidence-Based Technical Analysis

Well, this is easily the strangest book in my entire library. I had bought this book almost immediately when it came out. I tried to read a few chapters the first day I got it and it basically sat on the shelf since that day. My intial opinion was that it was complete and utter garbage having nothing at all to do with the title. Having recently started to get into data mining I ran across mention of it in a thread, opened up it tonight and completely ripped through half of it in awe.

The problem with this book is the title really should be in quotes as the author is essentially proposing a new form of technical analysis based on data mining and statistical inference as opposed to showing what traditional chart patterns or what not have positive expectancy. A more honest title would be "data mining and statistical inference of financial data for dummies".
As far as trading wisdom there really is none, if you embrace the concepts of this book it basically is setting out on a path of much learning and down a very different road from traditional TA. What I found quite interesting is that it brought together alot of things I found in this area from different sources in one book. Data mining traps and what to watch out for, the importance of judging your results against a random system....In all though it really is more of a philosophy book with a stats primer.

If you trade purely discretionary this book will be utterly worthless. Even for alot of systems trading it may be totally worthless. If your open to the idea of setting off on a new course though of basically leveraging what the computer is good at and what your brain is good it this may be worth several times its weight in gold but an incredible amount of work lays ahead if you embrace the concept of "EBTA".

I'm pretty much sold on the concept.