Currency Secrets

The oddly titled ebook “Bird Hunting In Lion Country” by Dirk de Toit (aka DrForex) is a book about trading the forex market.

Unfortunately I was a little disappointed after I had finished reading the book because Dirk did a good job keeping me hooked during the early chapters, but when the meat came round it was just fairy floss.

But let’s first talk about what I liked about the book:

Certain key points that I thought Dirk did well in harbouring on were the importance of fundamentals in a strategy. I know in my trading that there are times when I can get a little too lost in chart patterns, or indicators, or support and resistance lines that when an economic announcement is released it doesn’t pay ANY attention to those things and rips through all technical reasoning.

I definitely liked Dirk’s PET & 4×1 philosophy – I think this is very sound and something that all forex traders should know.

But then that’s about it… unfortunately.

And that’s why the book finished disappointingly. There was nothing there where the user could see Dirk at wirk (ok, I was a little cute there), but with only one chart showing us his trading activity it just wasn’t enough and his book made his system seem very ambiguous.

I mean from what I could gather his method went something like: obtain the fundamental direction of a currency as this will be its trend, obtain a monthly hourly chart, divide it into quadrants, buy low, sell high (if trend signals to go long – inverse if trend is short). Hold mental stops, take a profit (whenever you can??) and partially jump out in bits if the position moves against you and margin gets to be a problem, or exit completely if the fundamentals change.

Being someone who prefers technicals, someone who can code ideas into a computer and have them spit out results it was a little frustrating.

I wouldn’t have minded as much with Dirk’s ambiguity if he had provided a lot MORE examples of trades he had taken. As I said before he gives one such period where he plots about 7-8 trades, but doesn’t really give any good reason for why entry was at those bars. It would’ve been great if Dirk had taken a screen shot of the market prior to entry detailing WHY he was going to initiate a trade (using his methodology that he had outlined in previous chapters), then his thought process when either the position hit its peak or trough during the trade (obviously you wont know the highest or lowest point in a trade, but it would be interesting nonetheless to know what Dirk’s thought process was during some of the trades that he had – especially when a trade moves several HUNDRED pips against you!), and then what the thought process was for getting out.

Although Dirk boasts an above average accuracy with his forex trading, and while I personally DO NOT doubt his track record and performance, I feel that people may not be fully aware that Dirk’s method incurs high drawdowns – which I think is why he’s a huge advocate of extremely low leverage, you’ll need the low leverage to combat the large drawdowns.

Lastly, I also felt that the book tried to lead the reader into taking the next step of discovering more about how Dirk profitably trades by trying to get them to take the next step of getting them involved in his mentorship program. No doubt my concerns of not seeing enough evidence of Dirk’s method in his book would be satiated with the mentorship program… I assume.

So please be aware dear friends that if you do purchase this book and you are of the technical mindset such as myself you will be sorely disappointed with the lack of meat in his book. If though you are starting out in forex and prefer the fundamental approach to forex trading then Dirk du Toit (aka DrForex) wouldn’t be a bad start.

There aren’t too many forex books that I endorse… in fact, I don’t think there’s even one!

I suppose if someone were to twist my arm and recommend one there’d be a couple I’d choose from, but most of what you read in forex books nowadays is filler that can be found for free off the internet anyway.

And forex books definitely aren’t cheap these days.

However, all this has recently changed after devouring a new book written by famous forex strategists and authors Kathy Lien and Boris Schlossberg (both work for FXCM) aptly titled, High Probability Trading Setups for the Currency Market.

This book is well written and begins by discussing ten important forex rules that everyone should adhere to should they wish to survive in the forex markets (nothing new for advanced or intermediate forex traders here).

But it’s the second part of the book that excited me the most… they publish EIGHT different trading setups.

Now I’ll admit that none of these are super extraordinary, but that’s due to my experience. Everyone will be different. If you know how some of the more popular indicators work then you may be disappointed as nothing will be a surprise.

But, again, I’ve been around the trading world for over 9 years now and while they used these popular indicators in no new way I was still impressed with how they combined them with other indicators, or simply new where to place stops, and take profits (although there’s nothing revolutionary about their profit taking tactics in most systems) to create a strategy.

So I was impressed with the variety of systems (from reversal to trend following to 5 minute systems to daily systems) that were used and I’m sure that there’ll be one that will suit your trading style.

You can’t go too far wrong with adding this book to your trading collection, and if you focus on trading just one, auditing it every few months, and modifying it accordingly (and then repeating ad infinitum) I’m sure you’ll be well to achieving forex trading success.

Oh, and before I forget they end nicely by informing the reader the importance of economic announcements and which ones to watch out for.

Head over and download your copy now and have a good weekend devouring it.