I have to admit that I'm an avid reader of just about any "legitimate" forex content that I can get my hands on. If a new forex book is published, I'm one of the first to read it. I know some people think that one book is good enough but I just enjoy reading.
I ordered Raghee Horner's new book "Thirty Days of Forex Trading: Trades, Tactics, and Techniques" from buy.com last week and received the book yesterday. I've always enjoyed Raghee's commentary, webinars, and also her previous book, "Forex Trading for Maximum Profit." Here's a partial description of the book on Amazon:
...she shares her experiences in this field by chronicling one full month
of trading real money. First, Horner introduces you to the tools of the
forex trade, and then she moves on to show you exactly what she does,
day after day, to find potentially profitable opportunities in the
forex market.
The introduction of the book is a Raghee brain dump of her trading methodology. She talks about her main indicator, the Wave, support & resistance, fibonacci numbers, the MACD, and pivot points. She also gives a general overview of the forex market and also how to execute trades using a particular platform. My problem with this chapter is that I feel she is trying to endorse certain products in a way similar to James Dicks' in his book "Forex Made Easy." I don't know if Dicks' is a scam artist but I've heard he is a bit shady. Raghee attempts to push an introducing broker where she probably gets a cut of the spread. This just turns me off so I just skipped over this crap.
The remaining 30 chapters of the book are a rough trading journal broken up into 30 days. Let me get into the good first.
I thought that I knew everything there was to know about how Raghee traded but reading through her trade journal produced some additional information I had never heard from her before. One such thing was how she traded during the news or hot zones as she calls them. If she gets a setup opportunity before an important news release, she doesn't ignore it. She will take the trade and then use a 60-second stop once the news is released. She does this by getting rid of any stop orders she may have and then she waits for the 60 seconds to expire after the news release. She still mentally keeps the stop in her head and if after the 60 seconds, the price is below her stop in a long trade or above her stop in a short trade, she will exit the trade. She does this to clear out the emotion typically exhibited during the first minute after an important news release. If after the 60 seconds have expired and her stops were not hit, she will once again set a stop order at the levels she had them at before the news release.
Raghee really likes the use of fibonacci retracement or extension for her profit targets. A rule she uses in conjunction with figuring her profit targets is the 10-12 pip rule which says that if a certain support/resistance level is within 10-12 pips of her entry, she will ignore this level and use the next level. So if you entered long at 1.3012 and the .618 fibonacci level is at 1.3019, this level is not used as a profit target because it is only within 7 pips of her entry. She will use the next level, the .786 fibonacci as her 1st profit target.
What didn't I like about the book? There were a couple of things, one of those being that I feel like she didn't really address money management in her journal. She does mention it in the introduction but never mentions whether a trade had proper risk/reward for entry. The charts were also pretty hard to follow because many times they weren't on the same page that referenced them. They were also in black and white. I don't know much about publishing but for $85.00, you would think that all or some would be in color. (I didn't pay $85 which was retail, I paid about $50) If they weren't going to color the charts in print, they really should have included a picture of every chart on the CD that comes with the book. I thought including the color charts on CD would be common sense but obviously not. The CD just contains some videos similar to what you will find in her webinars.
While I found her explanations for trade entry, stop and limit placement satisfactory, I found that she didn't mention the end result of most of her trades. Only if a trade opened and closed on the same trading day did she sometimes mention it. I was constantly asking myself, "What happened to the trade she made yesterday." This may have been by design but I just felt like her trades could have been much more organized. She could have numbered each trade and at the least, included the results of each and every trade on the CD or in an appendix.
With the good comes the bad and I don't want to give everyone the impression that I didn't enjoy this book. I read it in under a day so I must have enjoyed it! I just felt like it could have been much more organized. I don't regret buying it because I did learn some important lessons from it, hopefully lessons that I can use in the future.
If I had to give this book a rating from 1 (worst) to 10 (best), I would give it a 6.
If you're interested in reading more about the book or buying it, go to Amazon.
I picked up a copy of "Millionaire Traders" by Kathy Lien and Boris Schlossberg a couple of weeks ago and just returned it to the bookstore. I know I've been tough on Lien/Schlossberg in the past with their forex trading service but I just wanted to mention that my thoughts of this book were not influenced by their service. What a snoozer this book was. It was impossible to get through. It's basically a "Market Wizards" style question and answer book but it comes nowhere near to the quality of the Schwager books. I had never heard of any of the traders profiled in this book and I would have loved to know how Lien and Schlossberg verified that these traders were in fact successful. Some of them just didn't sound successful and some of the answers to questions were questionable at best. Sorry, but in this business, you need to show me PROOF and they just don't do it. This is just my opinion. Don't take my word for it, check out the book yourself. If anything, it's a good substitute for a sleeping pill.
