袁腾飞讲成吉思汗

袁腾飞一直是我非常喜欢的历史作者。近年来，老袁已经成功的取代了易中天在我心目中的位置。因此，袁老师只要一出书，我是义不容辞的支持。更何况，这是本关于偶像成吉思汗的书籍。袁老师讲述我的大英雄。。。怎么可能错过呢？

结果。。。读完的感觉还真的不太对！第一，本人对于心目中的大英雄是非常了解的。因此，这本书处处都有熟悉的背影。阅读太过熟悉的东西有时就是会反效果。以个人角度来说，里头真的没有什么新意。就算袁老师尝试着以他一贯风趣幽默的方式来讲述；但是，就是带不出那种所谓生动的画面。第二，可能成吉思汗的事迹本身就很严肃。因此，袁老师也正经起来了。那种一边读一边发出会心一笑的情景很少在阅读这本书籍时出现。

整体上，这本书籍还算称职的。该写的袁老师滴水不漏的都写了。整体的编排也算整整齐齐。或许是个人对袁老师的创作越来越有要求，因此这本书就是给不到我要的感觉。10分满，个人给予6分。扣除的4分主要还是个人需求不被满足的情况下而产生的。对于不甚了解成吉思汗的读者来说，这本书肯定是上上佳作。

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

This is a book published in 1841. According to my buddy who recommends this, it is a book that highly praised by late Jesse Livermore... Wow... a must read then...

Ended up... Hmm... I actually find it quite boring, LOL. First of all, this book was written in old English style. As such, is it hard to stay focus and readers might lost concentration while trying to digest each "madness". Besides, I personally found it too "long-winded" at times. Imagine, 100 over pages on each single topic and those topics are not something new to me. So, unless it is for the sake of historic detailing reason; I actually found it hard to concentrate.

Well, I appreciate the author's hard-work in presenting such a details historical stuff. But, from my own standpoint, this is a book that ONLY tells the story without presenting the author's personal thought. To make things worse, those presented stories are not really something new. To bookworm like me, the presented stories are too familiar and there is no "spark" and further excitement in reading it.

For a full rating of 10, I personally rate it at 4. Despite the dullness as mentioned above, we cannot discount the efforts done by the author in year 1841! For those who are new to the "madness" as presented, this could be the best choice of book to begin with...As for me; it is not really my cup of tea at the moment, LOL... 

The Trend Following Bible: How Professional Traders Compound Wealth and Manage Risk

After few nice read on my beloved football stuff, it is time to get serious again. In fact, it is the best way to kick off year 2015... provided this is a nice book!

At the end... it is a nice book. Relatively... Compares to Michael Covel with his Trend Following, Andrew Abraham may be the better author as he wrote this book with his professional trading experiences for 18 years in commodity. Put it this way... if Michael Covel's book focuses more on theory, Andrew Abraham presents this book with tons of practical part plus excellent examples.

I personally like the early part in this book where the author presents profiles of successful traders with evidence to support his "bible". In fact, along the book, the author repeats tons of psychology tips to ensure readers are ready with proper mindset. This is important to help traders instill strong mentality in dealing with trend following. After all, it is worth repeating as that stuff are useful regardless to newbie, intermediate or old and bold traders.

The only flaw is... there is a contradiction when the author tried to apply filters in bypassing certain trade opportunities. In my humble opinion, trend following is built up by tons of continuous small losses with a big chunk of huge profit to cover it. As such, every single opportunity is so precious that there is no way a trend follower can afford to miss out. As pointed by the author in the latter part of the book: "The last trade has no bearing on the upcoming trade. Every trade is 50/50 and statistically independent. You must take every trade - you cannot pick and choose because you do not know the future!" Ok... if that is the case, why apply filter and choose certain criteria not to trade? In my humble opinion, a cautious money management is good enough to solve the said problem!

Rating wise, this is definitely a nice book to read on. As such, I am rating it at 9/10 due to the small confusion as mentioned above. In fact, I highly recommend this book to newbie, as it is not so "theoretical" compares to Covel's "Trend Following".  It will be nice to read this book follow by Covel's other books. By then, readers may appreciate more on Covel's hard work in presenting his idea.

Last but not least... I wish to sum up this book with one of the best quote in the book:

After experiencing a loss or bad week, too many traders give up and start looking for or start trading a different strategy. And while the trading strategy they just abandoned is recovering from the drawdown, the new trading strategy may result in yet more losses, so again, they start looking for another. It becomes a vicious cycle.