Forex Books: What To Buy

If you visit any bookstore these days, even the smallest local store, you will probably see a range of forex books. If you go to a larger bookstore or an online store such as Amazon, the choice is overwhelming. It can be hard to know what to choose. So how much information do you need as a forex trader, and can you even get this from a book?

The first thing to look out for when you are choosing from the selection of forex books is that you want something that is up to date. There are some currency trading classics that were written back in the days when you had to have many thousands of dollars or be working for a bank in order to trade currency. Those may still hold some interest for the professional trader, but they are not necessarily the best choice for a beginner.

The internet has revolutionized online forex trading and created a huge number of small time retail traders working from home, often in their spare time. If you are one of that crew, you have different needs in terms of trading and education than the professional trader of ten or twenty years ago.

So that is the first point: look for something written recently, and something that addresses your own situation, according to whether you are a beginner or an experienced trader looking for new systems or more tips.

Next you should think about the author. You would assume that all forex books would be written by experienced and successful traders, but that is not necessarily the case. The authors might be professional writers commissioned to write about forex trading but without much practical experience of it, or they might be involved as a broker or in some other way on the fringes of the currency trading world. However, you are likely to get better tips from a genuine trader who has been in your situation and made a success of it, so look for something practical, even if the author might not be the best writer.

Whatever you choose, make sure that it covers the vital subject of risk management head on. This is something that many forex traders neglect, but it can make the difference between boom and bust for our funds.

You might want to consider buying a forex ebook rather than a printed book. These tend to be shorter, without the fluff, and much more practical. It is human nature to assume that bigger means better and to want more pages for your buck, but in fact, the opposite is often true. If you have to wade through a ton of introductory information that you can get elsewhere or are already familiar with, you could miss the genuine gold nuggets of information that could help you make money with forex trading for real. An ebook of 50 to 100 pages, full of step by step practical trading information, may be much more use to you than a whole library of 400 page printed forex books.