Trading Commodities and Financial Futures: A Step by Step Guide to Mastering the Markets, 3rd Edition

by George Kleinman

In this book, one of the world's most experienced traders introduces a new step-by-step methodology built on more than twenty-five years of success. George Kleinman begins with the basics - including a complete primer on how futures and options trading works, how traders' psychology impacts the markets, and how to avoid the pitfalls that trip up so many traders.
This edition offers updated coverage of electronic trading, the latest contracts, and state-of-the-art trading techniques you won't find in any competing book.

Genres: Finance, Business, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published October 1, 2004

Reviews

[Tianyi · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is stupid. I read this book hoping to gain some insights in commodity trading but found out it is all useless information with no concrete value.

[Sjors · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly enjoyed this book. George Kleinman is clearly a very experienced futures trader with many stories to tell. He explains the trade from the ground up, giving detailed examples, and never oversimplifying matters. To spice things up, he provides a number of funny anecdotes from his time as a pit trader that are fun without being over the top.

I found his material in the Futures Primer (Part 4) and The Intermediate Trading Course (Part 6) particularly useful and interesting. His overview on Options (Part 5) was not particularly useful to me, given my prior knowledge of options trading. Finally, The Advanced Trading Course (Parts 8-10) dealt with methods from Technical Analysis and was of no use to me, despite proving a pretty good, basic & no-nonsense overview of these approaches.

I suppose that if you are a trader needing to transact client's funds into the market, you can't afford to wait for the massive fundamental commodity lows and high that occur from time to time, you know, of the type 'pandemic -> oil price low' and then after that 'war in the Ukraine -> oil price high'. You need something snappier, something with more frequent entry and exit points. In such cases, technical analysis can be useful to garb your speculative short-term moves in the guise of respectable, (pseudo)scientific, methods. "It was the indicators wot made me do it." says the failed speculator to his enraged clients, and then producing a raft of 'evidence' of what this signal was successful in the past. Like the 'Voice From The Tomb' trade signal discussed in a sidebar of Part 4.

Luckily us private traders can afford to wait and sit on liquid funds to seed into extreme situations, so we don't need al that technical jazz.

Okay, time to wrap it up. I found Kleinman's book well-written overall, and useful in quite a number of places. Also, I kinda like the guy. I vacillate between 3 and 4 stars, but 3 shall be the number of the count and the number of the count shall be 3.

[Lord William Graham · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author is a long-term position investor with deep emphasis on fundamental analysis.