View Shopping Cart / Checkout 

Starting Out in Futures Trading

Description:

This book first appeared as a mini-course series in Commodities magazine in 1972-1973. When the series was pulled together with the new additional chapters, it became the first book of its kind on commodity futures trading, according to Todd Lofton, co-founder and editor of Commodities.

Getting Started was easily the most popular book to come out of the magazine and was the first basic text read by many new traders in the 1970s and 1980s. Over the years, it has been reprinted at least half a dozen times and revised several times. In each case there were lots of new things to talk about-contracts and products and strategies that weren't even around when the first version was written.

Powers had already written about Money, The Ultimate Commodity, in the first edition before most people had a clue what the new currency futures market was all about--or why it was so significant. Later editions brought new chapters on interest rate futures, options, stock index futures, managed futures and many other new developments that have marked the growth of the futures industry over the years. This completely revised and renamed edition retains all the basics and brings you up to date on how a new trader can approach today's marketplace.

Few people are as well qualified to write about futures and trading as Mark Powers, whose career path closely parallels the development of the futures and options industry. In getting his agricultural economics degree at the University of Wisconsin, Powers wrote his doctoral dissertation on pork bellies--at the time, the new frontier in futures trading.

Powers can get very complex very quickly when it comes to trading derivatives. But his style, reflecting his background in education and teaching, is to get to the heart of an issue and make clear what it's all about. Perhaps because he knows so much about so broad an area of the futures and options industry, he is able to convey to beginners the difficult concepts they need to grasp if they are to be successful traders.

Unlike the situation when the first edition of this book appeared, traders--even beginners--have a number of choices today to learn how to start trading. But it would not be surprising if this new edition, like its predecessors, again became one of the most popular volumes for the beginning trader.

Contents:

1: Stocks versus Commodities
2: Speculation Is Not a Four-Letter Word
3: Managed Futures--A Good Alternative
4: Commodity Index Futures--The Basket Approach to Investing
5: The Trading Plan
6: Choosing a Broker
7: The Order
8: Forecasting Prices--Supply and Demand
9: Basic Price Patterns--Forecasting Tools
10: Technical Analysis
11: Technical Analysis--The Tools and How They Work
12: Volume and Open Interest
13: Commodity Hedging--A Primer
14: Hedging--The Basis
15: Your Banker and Hedging
16: Commodity Hedging in Action
17: Energy Hedging--Some Examples
18: Fact and Fiction About Spreads
19: Financial Futures--An Introduction
20: Money--Trading the Ultimate Commodity
21: Understanding the Yield Curve
22: The Interest Rate Contracts
23: Hedging Applications for Financial Futures
24: Stock Index Futures and Options
25: Commodity Options
26: Strategies for Trading Options
27: Historical Development of Commodity Futures Trading
28: The commodity Futures Exchange