Trading Commodities and Financial Futures: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering the Markets

by George Kleinman

As an asset class, commodities are now as important as stocks and bonds – and with rapid growth in demand, profit opportunities in commodities are larger than ever. But today’s computer-driven markets are volatile and chaotic. Fortunately, you can profit consistently – and this tutorial will show you how. Building on more than 30 years of market success, George Kleinman introduces powerful trend-based techniques for consistently trading in your “sweet spot” for profits. Kleinman reveals exactly how the commodities markets have changed – and how you can use consistent discipline to avoid “shark-infested waters” and manage the market’s most dangerous risks. Ideal for every beginning-to-intermediate level trader, speculator, and investor, this guide begins with the absolute basics, and takes you all the way to highly-sophisticated strategies. You’ll discover how futures and options trading work today, how trading psychology impacts commodity markets even in an age of high-frequency computer trading, and how to avoid the latest pitfalls. Kleinman offers extensively updated coverage of electronic trading, today’s contracts, and advanced trading techniques – including his exclusive, powerful Pivot Indicator approach. Three previous editions of this tutorial have become international best-sellers. But the game has changed. Win it the way it’s played right now, with Trading Commodities and Financial Futures, Fourth Edition .

Genres: Finance, Business, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

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.