Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Raghee Horner is a private trader, founder of EZ2Trade Software, entrepreneur, and author. She is a regular contributor to a number of sites, including FXStreet, Trading Markets, and eSignal, as well as a featured speaker at the forex and Traders Expos. Horner's commentary and analysis is seen daily by thousands of traders at Raghee.com, gotforex.com, forextraderdaily.com, and her personal blog, ragheehorner.com. She is also the author of the Wiley titles Thirty Days of Forex Trading and Forex Trading for Maximum Profit.

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Praise for Forex On Five Hours A Week

"The style allows Raghee Horner to tackle the thorniest concept for beginning traders to understand from the outset shorting. The explanation is one that is the best I've read in many a book, all because she is conversing with you within the pages.

Kiara Ashanti, Active Trader Magazine

"Just who is Raghee Horner? That's easy. If you are a forex trader, Raghee Horner is a young woman who can change your life. She can turn your losses into profits. She can take the mystery out of trading this incredible market.

Peter McKenna, Investor's Business Daily

Trading the forex market has become one of the most popular forms of trading. It's a 24/7 job for many. But what if you have a day job and only a little time to dedicate to the market?

In Forex on Five Hours a Week, top forex trader Raghee Horner shows you how, with a few key techniques and just five hours a week, you can capture consistent profits in the forex market.

Aus dem Klappentext

Trading the forex market has become one of the most popular forms of trading, mainly because of its twenty-four-hour access and the fact that there is always a bull market available in this arena―a concept that is rather attractive today.

But what if you don't want to become a full-time trader? What if you just want to spend some time trading because you already have a job you like? Or what if you're just looking to make a few extra dollars every month trading on the side? That's where Forex on Five Hours a Week comes in.

With this book, author Raghee Horner―a top forex trader and trusted teacher of trading systems―distills her forex strategies into the most streamlined systems possible, and shows those with little time to dedicate to the market everything they need to know to capture consistent profits.

By sharing her extensive experience in classic charting techniques, price action, and market psychology, Horner enables traders and investors of any skill level to quickly capitalize on, and make money from, the forex market. Page by page, she lays out a blueprint for fitting forex trading into your current schedule and skillfully addresses how to analyze the market, use visual and objective tools, and formulize a successful trading plan. Along the way, Horner also covers many other essential elements of this discipline, including focusing on the right indicators and set-ups, working across multiple time frames and pairs, and understanding the role of individual financial centers.

Successful trading shouldn't be defined by time, but more importantly, by results. With Forex on Five Hours a Week as your guide, you'll learn how to execute successful forex trades without spending every waking hour in front of a computer screen.

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Forex on Five Hours a Week

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

Learn the rules or the game is over before it started.

People like to buy. That seems to simply be a fact of human behavior. One of the things that most traders and investors look for are markets that are heading up and will continue going higher. I can no more tell the future than anyone on Wall Street, and my guess is that your crystal ball is at the repair shop as well. So what can we do? Given the widespread preference for buying, the best thing to do is find a market where you can find a bull market no matter what. That's the forex market.

This is where the U.S. dollar comes in. The six most popular pairs in the forex market are either U.S. dollar-correlated majors or U.S. dollar-based commodity currencies also known as "comm dolls." You didn't think I was going to let you sound like a newbie now, did you?

Let's briefly discuss the difference. U.S. dollar-correlated majors are the euro/U.S. dollar, the U.S. dollar/Japanese yen, the British pound/U.S. dollar, and the U.S. dollar/Swiss franc. The four pairs trade against the U.S. dollar. The reason these are "correlated" is that the movements of these pairs have a strong relationship to the U.S. dollar, which we can track with the U.S. dollar Index. We'll talk in the next section about the relationships in detail, but for now keep in mind that the forex is a game of comparison. Is the U.S. dollar gaining or losing ground to another nation's currency?

If it seems as though I am spending an inordinate amount of time driving this point home it is because I think far too many traders forget that trading forex is a very tangible thing. It personally affects our everyday lives and the everyday finances of corporations and banks. Our world and collective economies are not isolated, and the global economy is now more intertwined than ever. Anyone who for a moment bought into the theory that somehow the U.S. economy was dislocated from Europe, Asia, and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) should now know different after witnessing a cataclysmic global slowdown. My point here is that forex, the relationship between different currencies, is at the heart of the worldwide financial system and the more you understand this relationship the better overall trader you will become. Now who said forex trading couldn't make you a better person?

FILL IN THE BLANKS

In case you're new to forex, here's the one line synopsis of what the foreign exchange market is: How many ____ will I get for ___ ?

How many yen will I get per U.S. dollar?

How many U.S. dollars will I get per euro?

So basically depending upon the strength or weakness of the U.S. dollar you may be able to get more or less of another currency in exchange. I think of it as the airport analogy. Let's say we all jump on a flight to Paris and upon landing we look to exchange our pocketful of U.S. dollars for euros. The forex rate will dictate what we get.

Traders and investors track, analyze, and use this price movement to determine whether they feel this rate will go higher or lower.

That brings us to commodity currencies or "comm dolls." Maybe you have heard a little about what these pairs are and how they behave. My take is a little different, so let's start with the basics. Generally speaking, commodity currencies are just what their name would suggest: a currency pair that has a strong correlation back to a particular commodity. Simple, right? Well, not so fast.

The Australian dollar/U.S. dollar, New Zealand dollar/U.S. dollar, and U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar are the three pairs you will most commonly call "comm dolls." Let's use the U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar or "canada" as an example. The "canada" has a relationship to the energies complex, meaning crude oil, heating oil, natural gas. It moves, however, with a strong correlation to crude oil. Why? Well, consider that the country of Canada is one of the world's leading exporters of crude oil (from www.eia.doe.gov/ pub/oil gas/petroleum/data publications/company_level_imports/current/ import.html).

You better bet the supply and demand of crude affects the Canadian economy. But is that the end of the story for commodity currencies? No, not even close. You see this pair has a correlation to the U.S. dollar as well. Remember it's the U.S. dollar/Canadian dollar pair. We not only have to consider the impact of crude oil on the Canadian dollar itself but also how the U.S. dollar is moving against the Canadian dollar.

I am going to go into great depth later on about these relationships and my Forex Market Pulse. For now, though, think about this: Does crude oil affect the Canadian economy alone? I think we have seen what high crude oil prices have done to the U.S. economy as well. So bottom line? All pairs that have a relationship back to the U.S. dollar will have a certain amount of impact from crude oil. And that means that all U.S. dollar pairs can be considered comm dolls to a certain extent. Now that's not something you will hear from most traders, but I'm here to tell you that's the way it is.

So, there's always a bull market somewhere in the forex. When you consider all the different countries, commodities, and the relationship they have with one another, it's easy to begin to understand that while some currencies are being beaten down, others are rallying in comparison or are considered safe haven currencies. This is why you will always find that some pairs are heading lower while others are ripe for buying.

A BULL IS ON THE LOOSE!

One of the more appealing aspects of the forex market, beyond the 24-hour always open trading, is the fact that there's always a bull market somewhere amongst the pairs. The idea of buying a stock or futures contract or a forex pair is much more familiar to most people, especially since most of us are already familiar with investing. Investing and trading do have two completely different mindsets. For investors, the whole idea is ownership: to own more shares of a company or mutual fund or even ETF (electronically traded funds). Most people incorrectly believe that trading is buying low and selling high ... wrong! That is actually investing. Now, of course, investors do hope that their holding will increase in value, but that is secondary to ownership.

Traders don't own anything; in fact, they don't want to because the goal in trading is to profit from price movement. Instead of owning, traders control shares, contracts, lots, or pairs with leverage. Now what does all this have to do with playing U.S. dollar strength or weakness? Traders understand that in order to profit from price movement they must buy and short. That's right, "short." After all, trading means making money in up and down markets. If you were only to play one side of the market you would consistently miss opportunities to benefit from when the U.S. dollar moves a pair lower.

Consider this move. The U.S. dollar gains strength on the euro. The resulting move on the chart would be weakness, a sell-off and even a downtrend in the EUR/USD (euro/U.S. dollar). In order to profit from this relationship a trader would have to short or sell the EUR/USD. Here's another example, one that has hit closer to home...