The Essentials of Trading masterfully teaches the novice how to conceptualize, implement, and manage the important fundamentals that form the building blocks of successful trading. Because the book and its examples have been classroom tested at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, the pace of presentation is ideal for a full or partial classroom exposure to Internet-based trading. The book is highly recommended as a viable academic teaching tool, and equally so for the developing nonstudent practitioner.
Author’s Introduction:
The Essentials of Trading started with the intention of providing university finance and economics students with a practical, real-world resource they could use to learn about trading the financial markets. While structuring the text, I had in mind the length and progression of a standard college semester-long course. In fact, even before I started putting it all into book format, the contents and presentation that follow were successfully applied in a series of university level graduate and undergraduate financial markets and managerial economics courses.
Anyone who has been through a finance curriculum knows that most modern financial coursework is biased toward application in an institutional environment. It does not provide much direct use to the individual in terms of personal investment, risk management, and/or speculative efforts. This text seeks to take a different approach, one that focuses more directly on the individual, but with institutional carryover application of use to those who are, or eventually will become, involved in decision making at that level.
That all said, this book was written for anyone and everyone. While a general knowledge of the financial markets is useful, it is not required. Most of the students with whom I have worked over the past several years had some knowledge of things like the stock market, but they were complete novices to actually trading. For that reason, this book starts at the very beginning, so that no reader—student or otherwise—is forced to play catch-up.
Contents:
- Introduction and Getting Started
- Trading Mechanics
- Price Action and Its Influences
- Building the Trading Plan
- Risk and Money Management
- Market Analysis
- System Design and Testing
- System Results and Position Size
- Application