Author: Greg N. Gregoriou
This is a book I enjoyed reading. Compared to some other arid titles in finance, “The Handbook of Trading Strategies for Navigating and Profiting from Currency, Bond, and Stock Markets” represents a change in approach which I appreciated.
Why? Well, the answer comes in relatively easy. “The Handbook of Trading Strategies” is not an academic book which takes you painfully slow chapter by chapter through the arid domain of the trading theory. On contrary, Gregoriou has put together a thick handbook of case studies from which various authors derive generalized conclusions about trading on various market environments.
Each chapter is actually a case study in one trading domain. Authors apply their specific knowledge to various topics, such as arbitrating the various currency markets (Chapter 17. Disparity of USD Interbank Interest Rates in Hong Kong and Singapore: Is There Any Arbitrage Opportunity), applied technical analysis (Chapter 7. Profitability of Technical Trading Rules in an Emerging Market) or parallel trading (Chapter 2. Informed Trading in Parallel Auction and Dealer Markets: The Case of the London Stock Exchange).
Per se, “The Handbook of Trading Strategies” represents rather a heterogeneous collection of trading-related articles. But here lies its nice value for the reader – you do not have to read it from the beginning to the end, on a linear manner. Actually the book invites you to skimming through. My own approach (and I am a disorganized person) is to read through the summary, select a few chapters and take a taste of them quickly. If it works and I like what I read, I then go through and select another chapter. Thus, “The Handbook of Trading Strategies” works perfectly for the disorganized or short-in-time reader – especially for the hard-working professional who needs to keep up to speed with the latest developments in trading.
Secondly, it is hard for a normally-informed individual to create for himself a reference shelf of articles. After all, only few authors get the time and the energy to develop their points in a book – and then how many of us do you have the time to read hundreds of pages? In this case, the structure works perfectly, since the collection of trading articles are up to date and cover interesting points.
There are a few hiccups though – for example I did not really grasp the purpose of having a chapter relating trading to climate changes (Chapter 18. Forex Trading Opportunities Through Prices Under Climate Change). I mean – the author does an interesting point but I see not immediate value in it for a forex trader. Naturally, if you are a curious person or if trading is a hobby for you, it might be the case that you go for this extra mile, but otherwise, why bother?
At last but not at least, “The Handbook of Trading Strategies” comes with an accompanying power point presentation with questions for each chapter. This might be useful for the students in the field and works well for using the book as a study case collection, I would have just looked rather at a fully integrated web page rather than to a dull ppt file.
But these are small shortcomings in my opinion. “The Handbook of Trading Strategies” remains one of the rare study-case oriented books on the market and as such, a strong information tool for the perfectionist trader.