Independently Published Statistically Sound Indicators For Financial Market Prediction: Algorithms in C++

Really good book. You can tell that the author knows what he is talking about, and that he is an experienced practitioner himself. Besides explanations of the indicators, there are valuable comments on what they’re good for and how choose parameters.

On the title of the book there is a stamp (of approval): “The Technical Analyst: 2020 Book of the Year”! Absolute correct! In the last weeks I read through the book completely and learned a lot about indicator design. Although I have programmed indicators for a decade, reading the book was refreshing and brough a wealth of new knowledge. Even if I have intuitive understood “stationarity and scaling” over the years, reading the detailed explanation finally sealed it. The largest part of the book is about indicators, some well-known, some novel and new (for me at least), a discussion of how they work and then comes the implementation. Now to be truthful: having detailed C coding for each indicator might not be everyone’s kettle of fish, but if you work at a technical “in depth” level, then this is exactly what is required. The coding and the description to each indicator is well written and clear. Based on the source code (available from the author’s web page), I have now “ported” many of the indicators to TradingView to further test them -- porting the indicators is a straightforward exercise! And this is a tribute to the quality of the book and the code. An interesting gem revealed in the book is a program called “VarScreen” (available on the author’s web page). This program allows for all types of statistical evaluation, given deep insight into indicators, and the “interaction” between indicators – to be exact: it is pure statistics at its best practically applied. Overall, for designing and implementing indicators, a highly recommended book!

A great book that will teach you how to establish whether or not an indicator can be effective, and how to make your custom indicator effective with less trial-and-error efforts. Its first three chapters alone would be worth of the investment in this book, and there is much more after them. One star less because of the space occupied by C++ code. Most of the points made by this book have been developed as C++ code, that is also available for download (free and anonymous) at the author's website. Nowadays Python is de facto the preferred programming language for statistics and machine learning. For instance, you can calculate entropy in Python with two lines of code, when the author's code sprawls across one entire page of this book. To avoid being dependent by the programming language, it would be better to occupy the same space with numerical examples of calculation. Apart from C++, I recommend this book; it helped my automated trading efforts.

Impossible to work with this book. Almost no trader should have it on their bookshelf. Very little is properly explained, certainly not demonstrated graphically. This is a coding book that doesn't resemble trading as you would know it. To set the stage, if applying the standard normal cumulative density function to a calculation means nothing to you, then don't buy this book.

Top notch. Obviously no groundbreaking secrets are going to be revealed for the price. You will understand how to fine tune your own indicators. I did not know C++ but with some hours of reading C++ basics I was able to convert the FTI into python and C# so it shouldn’t be a major obstacle though this did end up taking me a day or too. Be sufficiently able in programming. It says algorithms in C++… the warning to other reviewers was in the title. Don’t purchase something that says it’s in C++ then complain it’s in C++. In further editions I would increase the price but add an extra chapter on PCA which would perhaps be useful. The use of copulas also seems to be a new field in pairs trading. Overall a good job by Tim. I do wish Tim would come out of the shadows and do more interviews. I will probably go through all Tims books at some point after finishing this one.