Lately I have been reading many forex trading books, trying to climb quickly the steep learning curve necessary. Necessary to transform this into a full time occupation. In the beginning I thought it was easy, as most of the beginner traders think. Just read a couple of books and test a bit the platform for trading forex pairs, no matter what it is: Metastock or metatrader or other proprietary platform. They all looked the same and the methods seemed easy. Manage your risk, manage your emotions, play with technical indicators and your life will become soon easy and flowing.
Of course this did not work. The more I demo-traded, the more my losses increased. The more books I am reading, the more things I find out. Yet, I wish I had in the beginning a book such as this lady trader has written.
Raghee tried to show us how to quickly part time trade, without having the power of information, the capital or the time that big institutions or the pros do. And that is a big thing, since you do not want to give up your full time job in the beginning. This might be an easy temptation because a couple of successful hits might smell like easy money, in a repeated sequence. But the truth is that you need to learn the skill. And I needed to do the same of course. So for me the book seems easy now when I have some skills. Yet, I needed it so badly earlier.
So this is a beginner to intermediate book, that we established. Yet, the book is full of repeatable nice advice. It starts by teaching you the ropes. For example, most of the beginners like only to buy and not to short a stock. This is even more true since the restrictions introduced several years ago by SEC against shorting. Yet, trading is valid on both directions, so why not get used with shorting?
Then, Raghee introduces the basics of trading. What do the charts tell you? What are the market cycles? What is a market memory? These might be easy words for a pro trader. Even for a beginner, these words sound familiar. But over the long term the recognition of the key factors impacting a forex pair value make the difference between an upward and a downward trend. Or between your possibility of riding this trend in the right direction. In other words, Raghee tries to teach you how to survive. And it gives you the right tools in order to do so.
One more problem was that few books I read so far were attempting to clarify the main technical indicators applied for forex. Everybody talks about Fibonacci – and sometimes you can even find some references. Raghee Horner manages to explain a few indicators which are key to understanding the markets. The Elliott wave theory seemed so complicated to me in the beginning, and the more books I read, the more unclear it became – in application. Raghee puts it at work nice and easy so that I then understood it and even applied it for a couple of times.
And this is just half of the book. “Forex on Five Hours a Week” enters into the details of several forex pairs and clears their idiosyncracies. I used to trade USD/CAD and her comments confirmed and expanded some of my market hypothesis. It is good to have a more experienced trader to show you some of the light behind the trading curtains. And Raghee manages to do this properly.
This is not an easy book though. You can skim through quickly, or you can read it slowly and compare it with your own experiences. You can even try to apply it in practice, with some nice successes, as I did. And you can avoid some nasty pitfalls – for example the ones linked to risk management, the drawing table where you do the difference between growing and wasting your trading capital. It is up to you – Raghee just did a nice job in helping you out with her advice. “Forex on Five Hours a Week” is a well written small forex book, well worth your time. Enjoy.