Must-Read Books of Forex Trader

Knowledge can make miracles happen, especially when you endeavor to succeed in the Forex market trading. And what is the second best source of knowledge (with the first best being your experience)? Books! Learning to trade is an easy, interesting and organized process, if you study the right books. Here is the list of the trading related books that will help you develop your skills and increase your confidence in the markets:

1. School of Pipsology by BabyPips.com — it is the best Forex trading study manual as of now. And it’s also completely free. It’s written in a very easy language and offers a lot of explanations that are vitally needed by the beginning traders.
2. Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre — this book is based on the biography of the legendary stock trader Jesse Livermore, who is often seen as an icon of the financial trading success. It’s a good half-fiction read that will provide with some interesting thoughts on trading.
3. Emotion Free Trading by Larry Levin — Forex trading is a very stressful activity with a huge part of your success depending on your emotional control. This book will try to teach to control your good and bad emotions and trade based solely on your strategy rules.
4. Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom by Van K. Tharp — the author of this book is a financial genius, whose developments in the money management of the financial trading can be applied in any market and will open your eyes on some aspects of the money management that are usually hidden from the beginning Forex traders.
5. Position-sizing Effects on Trader Performance: An experimental analysis by John Ginyard — it’s a pretty long scientific paper that describes and analyzes the experiments on position-sizing effects. If you lack the hard evidence of the most common money management rules — read this and you’ll have it.

There many other interesting books that are worth reading if you are seriously trading on Forex or any other financial market. But these listed are the marvels of the trading literature, in my opinion. If you don’t have enough time to read them all, try to read at least several pages of them and, probably, you’ll find them to be more important than something else.

Disadvantages of the Automated Forex Trading

In my last post I’ve described the best advantages of the automated Forex trading. But, of course, I understand that the trading using the expert advisors isn’t always something good. Everything has its own pros and cons; so the automated trading has its own disadvantages and I’ll try to describe them in this article:

1. No intuition to help your trading. Computers and programs simply don’t have anything similar to that mystical human feeling. While some traders don’t think that the intuition can be helpful in trading, others rely on it — such traders probably won’t be pleased with the automated trading.
2. Smooth trade execution and uninterrupted run-time of the expert advisors is critical with many trading systems. Unfortunately, it’s something very hard to achieve running EA from your home or work PC. That means that you’d require some dedicated server to run your automated trading.
3. Some types of strategies are simply impossible to implement into the real expert advisors. The chart pattern or wave analysis and fundamental analysis are extremely hard to code in the trading program. At the current level of the AI development these tasks are better performed by he live trader manually.
4. The expert advisors should be made quality or otherwise their trading results will disappoint you. Unfortunately, not all expert advisors handle errors and other unexpected events correctly — sometimes this can lead to the huge losses. Moving your working EA from one broker to another can also be a problem, since broker servers differ and what works perfectly on one broker can stop working on another.
   

As you see, nothing is perfect in this world and, while being the extremely interesting and popular tool, automated Forex trading has its own problems. The wise decision here, in my opinion, would be using both types of trading to your advantage. The systems that can be easily implemented as the expert advisor and are too hard to be traded manually are better to be automated, while the simple systems that involve chart pattern and fundamental analysis are better left for the manual trading.

Advantages of the Automated Forex Trading

Trading with the expert advisors is seen by many (especially newbie) traders as the «holy grail» possibility. Such traders expect from each EA they find or buy the fast and risk-free profits. Of course, expert advisors are not the «holy grail» in Forex trading. Automated Forex trading is just another tool that can make the trader’s life a bit easier and sometimes even more profitable. Here is the list of the advantages of trading Forex with expert advisors:

1. With expert advisors you can trade during the time you can’t trade manually. You can set up an expert advisor to trade for you when you are asleep, when you are away or when you are too busy to be involved in the market. Of course, you can hire someone else to trade for you, when you are away, but that’s rather ineffective decision.
2. Strict following the trading system is another advantage of the automated Forex trading. If you have a strategy implemented in the expert advisor it will trade according to that strategy without any deviations. If you find it hard to follow your own system without modifying it constantly, try using an EA that would do all the work.
3. Automated trading excludes any emotions form your market behavior. Computers and programs don’t have any emotions and won’t overtrade if they lose. If you are not very good at holding your emotions down, automated trading will definitely help you.
4. Complicated strategies are not a problem for the expert advisors. For the live trader it’s not an easy task to monitor a dozen of indicators and compare each of them to the entry conditions, whereas expert advisors can do that easily and in no time at all.
5. «Errare humanum est» said the Roman stoic; that means that despite your experience in Forex trading, you’ll make a lot of stupid mistakes through your trading career. Computers are not human, and if programmed without errors, expert advisors won’t make any errors during the trading.
6. There are many things a live trader just can’t do — trading on multiple strategies, timeframes and currency pairs simultaneously is one of them. If you want to use your system on several currency pairs and timeframes — use expert advisor. If you want to test several systems at the same time — also use the expert advisor.
7. The time of reaction, analysis and decision making can be critical in many Forex trading systems. Where manual trader just can’t do it fast enough, automated systems will work fine.
   

Perhaps, I’ve missed some important advantages here, but this list looks quite impressive to me. Of course, there are certain disadvantages in the automated Forex trading, but they will be a subject of my next post.