January 18, 2019

Jack Schwager: Have The Markets Changed Over The Years?



Jack Schwager has written four excellent book on his Market Wizards series (Market Wizards, The New Market Wizards, Stock Market Wizards and Hedge Fund Market Wizards). When asked on how these new traders differ from the ones interviewed in the first book he answered:

"Every person is a different personality, different story, different lessons and different way of trading. Even within this book (Hedge Fund Market Wizards) everybody I interviewed is completely different on how they make money in the markets. (That's) amazing, I mean, I couldn't even make up as many various ways of trading markets as these people are using."

On the price action itself, Jack stresses that markets have changed a lot over the years but the main trading principles do not really change over time:

"Markets are always changing and but certain principles but the main principles don't change." 

While trend following worked very well in the eighties and nineties, in the modern markets they do not work well. One of the reasons for that is the proliferation of computerized trading systems and models:

"I think one big change is the the big trend following profits that were easy to take in those earlier years no longer are then you can still get big trends but markets sent a much more false breakouts you tend to have lots of choppier conditions it's more difficult to make money doing that type of approach you can still do it but has to be a bit more sophisticated."