Taming the Lion

Richard Farleigh reveals the 100 secret strategies that he developed to enable him to succeed in the markets.

During his time running a trading desk, Farleigh set out to develop a repeatable methodology based on observation and reasoning, not just on one-off flukes and luck, to enable him to outperform the market on a regular basis.

The (potentially controversial) beliefs that he incorporates into his strategies include:

- Markets tend to under-react, not overreact.
- Big, obvious ideas offer great opportunities.
- It is safe to invest with a consensus view.
- Contrarian trading is usually irrational.
- It is best to enter and exit the share market at the right times instead of always staying invested.
- Price trends are well known but under-utilised.
- Chartists are just astrologers.
- Investment and trading are increasingly similar.

Some of the techniques simply involve being better than other investors at some of the basics, including only chasing genuine opportunities, managing risks and coping with losses.

As his trading results started to attract some attention, Farleigh was frequently asked to give presentations of his ideas to other professional traders. From the feedback during these sessions he realised that others were interested in an approach to investing which was based on first principles. Finding that anecdotes were the best way to make a point, and that ideas could be summarised into numbered strategies, allowed him to show clearly how the methodology worked.

Years later, he is still using the same approach, and has found that amateurs, as well as professionals, are keen to find out how markets work and how to improve their investment performance. This book contains those secrets.

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About the 100 Strategies

The rules are based on two broad experiences. Firstly, my involvement with investing and trading has been an endless pursuit of looking for patterns and developing my own repeatable methodologies. I have wanted to turn an art into a science. Secondly, from so many conversations with intelligent and educated people, who are curious about markets, but have been unhappy with a lack of useful reading material.

The book is intended for anyone with an interest in trading or investing, whether they are amateurs or professionals. The laws grew out of a series of popular lectures that I gave in my early career and out of the process of training new people to trade the markets.

Perhaps a unique thing about my approach in this book is that I have developed a framework which is applicable to all markets, whether they are bonds, money market, commodities, currencies, stocks, or property. The more I have learnt about these markets the more I have been convinced that it is sensible to approach them the same way. This is very useful, especially when some markets are underperforming.

This is a serious book. It is definitely not a "how to get rich quick" trick. I have presented my observations and interpretations as laws for practical purposes. It incorporates equally a lot of groundwork analysis of markets.

In finance there has been a gap between practitioners and the theoreticians. I intend to bridge that gap with a solid and, at times, theoretical explanation for my observations. Nevertheless, I have presented the material in a personal way. It is light hearted, with lots of anecdotes. I have not done endless amounts of research on each of the laws, so at times I may have erred on the detail. However it is always the concepts that are important, as these are what I am trying to get across.