The Next Perfect Trade is a valuable book about the philosophy of trading. It has a similar flavour to Soros on Soros, interspersing somewhat abstract philosophical arguments with real market wisdom and examples of trades.
Gurevich discusses his framework for identifying macro trades. In brief, they should:
The idea of dominant trades is something new to me (the other points, while excellently explained, have been discussed in various other texts). Literally starting from first principles – modus ponens – Gurevich identifies several logical truths:
Even if this was my only takeaway from the book, it will have been worth it: a simple razor (that is common sense once you’ve chewed through the logic) to help choose between trade expressions.
Gurevich’s trading style is unlikely to be completely applicable to many finance professionals: few have a mandate as flexible as his, both in terms of the breadth of asset classes, and the tolerance for drawdowns. But many of his ideas are still widely applicable and they match with advice I have heard first-hand from several traders and PMs, for example: “don’t get cute” with trade implementation, don’t fight the Fed, trade with the trend, etc.
I want to find more examples of this type of book: new theoretical frameworks, applied to practical examples and distilled into key takeaways (Geopolitical Alpha is another great example).