Book Review > Trading Futures For Dummies

Trading Futures for Dummies would be quite a useful book for someone who hasn’t traded futures before and who is looking for a practical guide on how to start. I found the book easy to follow and it provided a reasonable amount of information about the different types of futures markets to trade and also some actual futures trading strategies.

This book covers the basic concepts about futures and options on futures and there is a chapter on the advantages of Exchange Traded Funds as an alternative trading vehicle. I found the section on Analysing the Markets quite useful. This section stresses the need to understand the fundamentals of the economy and how best to use the various economic reports from a trading perspective. The section also touches on some of the basics of technical analysis and how they can be applied to trading futures.

A chapter is dedicated to each of the commodity groups with guidelines on what information a trader would need to get a handle on (and where to find it) if they were to trade that market. There are clear explanations on how and why various external situations affect the futures prices. The book also has a complete section on developing a trading plan which touches on some psychology and money management and quite a useful chapter on the actual process of executing a successful trade. It is often this practical and hands on information that is overlooked in some trading books but not in this one.

I did find a couple of the charts difficult to follow in relation to the text and this appears to be due to incorrect price and date references but apart from this most of the chart and other examples were clear and easy to understand.

Overall, the book offers quite a comprehensive guide to trading futures. I liked the focus on determining your overall net worth and the advice not to trade futures at all if this did not reach a certain dollar amount. Trading Futures for Dummies keeps the words and the suggested approaches to trading futures relatively simple and practical.

Joanne Stuhmcke is a member of the AIA.