Kroll on Futures Trading Strategy

I read Stanley Kroll’s Kroll on Futures Trading Strategy this evening. First point is that book is 18 years old. But I found it a great reading. Kroll has an engrossing writing style that kept me reading till the end of the book.

His major point was that you need a good trading strategy over a good trading system. He focuses on drumming in the behaviour you need. Discipline.

On the trading system front he doesn’t really say how you should do it. He talks a lot about subscribing to chart services where you get mailed hard copy charts. He also talks about micro-computers and their increasing role is trading systems.

Aspects that Kroll talks about like not liking cocoa due to volatility and lack of trend formation would be interesting to compare with how the future markets are behaving now.

The biggest concepts from the book that I appreciated where:

  • Let profits run, and use moving stops take your profit.
  • Close loses early, via placed stops (verse mental stops) at your accepted risk level.
  • Lookout for intra-day/week volatility as professional traders manipulate prices trying to fleece stops (buy/sell reversals) above major resistance points.

Which I think apply to any market, not just the futures markets.