A new secant method for unconstrained optimization
  We present a gradient-based algorithm for unconstrained minimization derived from iterated linear change of basis. The new method is equivalent to linear conjugate gradient in the case of a quadratic objective function. In the case of exact line search it is a secant method. In practice, it performs comparably to BFGS and DFP and is sometimes more robust. 
Stephen A. Vavasis