Way of the Turtle review

09Apr07

The Way of the Turtle book giveaway has come to a close. L.S. in Kentucky is the winner of the autographed copy of the book that was generously provided by the book’s author Curtis M. Faith. Thanks again to all of you who took the time to drop us a line.

We don’t know about you, but we like our book, CD, and movie reviews short (and to the point). For any item we want to know whether we should buy it, borrow it or ignore it all together. We believe a wide-range of investors would be well-served to buy (and read) Way of the Turtle.

We are of course not alone in our opinion of the book. A word of caution however. Those of you thinking you are going to learn the “inside secrets” of the Turtles should look elsewhere. The fact of the matter is that there are no inside secrets. As noted in the book, the rules taught to the Turtles are easily described, and are included in this book. Also note that they have written about previously.

As Faith writes it was learning how to consistently apply these rules, that are primarily trend-trading based, that spelled the difference between success and washing out of the program altogether. He also summarizes the application of behavioral finance to trading as well.

Some time has passed from the end of his stint as a Turtle. We believe that Faith was well-served by waiting to write this book. This time and additional professional experience in trading systems development has helped Faith put into proper perspective the lessons learned from his Turtle days.

We first became aware of the book from the associated blog. (Hint, hint publishers.) A recent post there highlights one of the lessons we took away from the book. In that post, which is adapted from the book, Faith highlights a more robust way of measuring back-tested model performance. The often-used CAGR (cumulative average growth rate) is highly dependent on the starting and ending dates of the test. However an alternate measure, that uses the slope of the regression line of the equity curve is a far more robust measure, hence RAR (or robust annual return).

We hope this whets your appetite for more. We thought at the outset of Abnormal Returns we would be writing more book reviews. If there more books like Way of the Turtle we might write some more reviews.