Which Forex books to read?

Hello professional traders, would you please recommend your best books on trading? I am ready and open to receive new information, but have already read so many pointless books... Thank you!

Not forex but trading... Michael Martin's "The Inner Voice of Trading" is worth a look and not talked about very much.

The New Market Wizards by Jack Swagger
The Way Of The Turtle by Curtis Faith

Hi,
What you get from any given book is a personal thing, it depends on your perceptions, beliefs and needs. Most of the books that will get mentioned are worth a read, even the poor ones have value in that they illustrate what not to do.

Read widely, assimilate the information, develop your own views, distill out a trading plan and then start practising on demo. Personal trading experience is going to be a lot more valuable learning curve than any book, but reading a selection of books is a good way to gather the initial information and ideas.
My personal favourite: Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.

Perhaps, first decide what you need to learn or which aspects of Forex trading you are lacking in.

KP

Secrets of a Pivot Boss, by Franklin Ochoa

Thank you everyone, for all of your shares. I will check out the books. I have noticed that a lot of the books talk about "patience" and "greed" and all the like, but even when I manually back test systems (I have tried hundreds), while following all of the strict rules, it still always comes out to an overall loss. So I really do not understand how the whole "emotional" aspect helps at all. I am starting to believe that all technical indicators are just a distraction created to mislead novice traders in order to fuel the market with losses. Do professional traders really use indicators? Or purely price action? Thank you...

I have about 20 Forex texts. I still rate Mark Douglas "trading in the zone", for the psychological aspect and importance of mindset, but in a practical sense I find my experience in front of the screen is many many times more beneficial than the texts I've read. I do like candlestick so I like my candlestick texts, but they have limitations too- like getting excited about a doji reversal.. followed by another doji reversal etc, every indicator offers a rough probability only, it's the experience of screen time that gives the trader the edge to know how best to respond to each day trading.
BTW I recommend reading Old tradermans thread in the journal forum here on FF called THE GOOD, the bad and the ugly. A sound read recognising that trading is not all good, it's a slow slog.
Cheers h.

If you are a beginner start with these:
1. Currency Trading for Dummies, by Brian Dolan
2. Day Trading and Swing Trading the Currency Market, by Kathy Lien
3. Currency Forecasting: A Guide to Fundamental and Technical Models of Exchange Rate Determination, by Michael Rosenberg
4.Japanese Candlestick Charting Techniques, by Steve Nison

Hi runtherace,
You make some interesting points here.

Over the years I have manually tested hundreds of mechanical rule based trading systems and the one thing from the results that leapt out at me was how closely pegged the vast majority were to a zero net result. It suggested to me that there is little edge in purely mechanical systems. By extension it also suggested to me that if there was any consistent edge to be gained it probably had to come from trader skill in a disciplined somewhat discretionary trading method.

Basic point being, the edge lies with the trader, not the method. There is circumstantial evidence to support this idea in that you can give the same trading plan to an experienced skilled trader and a novice and, funnily enough, it's the skilled trader who tends to make rather more money with it.

Carrying this on, the emotional/greed/patience aspects you mention are simply aspects of natural human behaviour that are mostly not helpful in trading. The experienced skilled trader generally has better control of their emotions whilst trading than the novice and this is a large reason for their better performance. So, these aspects are important, but not in the of context of mechanical trading rules per se.

As for technical indicators, if you look at their construction most indicators are simply derivatives of price. I have also never found any standard indicator that by itself has added any net value over a big sample backtest. This is perhaps not surprising, if there were one everyone would flock to use it and become disgustingly rich. If an indicator helps a trader makes sense of the price action then great, why not use it, but be clear that any achieved success is most likely not the indicator itself but how a trader uses it - again, the edge lies with the trader, not the indicator.

On the matter of professional traders working for financial firms, I have known a few over the years. Simplistically, they essentially fall into two broad types - position traders taking longer term directional trades based primarily on a fundamental view of the market; and market makers looking to extract the bid-offer spread whilst trying to run a flat net book, mostly just reacting to the flow of business coming through their book. So, no, I wouldn't say either are big users of technical indicators as a prime decision making tool, though they may look at some of them as a secondary source of extra information/insight. Their involvement in the market is quite different to the typical retail trader.

Hope some of that may help

The problem with the fundamentals is that I cannot backtest it. I'm pretty sure big funds have more advanced tools so that they can automate the whole thing.. who knows.

I don't care.. everything I need is on charts. Since many ppl asked me to share something.. I don't use indicators, but bbs and mas are still good indis.

I have the 1st one; really very much useful to understand the fundamental!

Hi, people,
question must be reversal 'which Forex books not to read?' because it's so much nowadays 4x books you can better segregate what not to read instead what to read. From that point come interesting sense, you can become domain expert but also can trap with that knowledge so better learn new information as a beginner, but develop that skill its not that simple.

You can read any book, blog, article is good, you are learning, but not all books will help you the same, some will not be so good as others and in the end you have to decide what trading style matches your character and way of life.

For me books about trading psychology helped me most to understand the market which is difficult to learn to trade, but it will worth in the end, remember we are learning from our mistakes.

“Market Wizards” and “ The Intelligent Investor” these are some great books I have read on trading.

“The new Trading for a living" is very good book for you

I have read the second one and it’s an amazing book.

Where can I download a pdf? Thanks

My favourite is “The Disciplined Trader : Developing Winning Attitudes” by Mark Douglas.