Description

Joseph Seelentag & Daniel Peleg – The Art of Forex Portfolio

This time I’d like to talk you about an ebook (PDF format) titles “The Art Of Forex Portfolio” that I had the chance to read the first time more than one year ago. The content now has been updated and I had the chance to re-read it lately.

 

The ebook is quite an easy reading, but also very practical and so I’m sure that those of you that want to learn how to build a portfolio will surely find it very useful.

 

 

The book is dividide into a few chapters (15):

 

Chapter 1 is an overview of the book and presentation of the authors.

Chapter 2 is an introduction to Forex and a briefly to MT4 and ZuluTrade platform.

Chapter 3 introduces a few basic concepts like risk/reward and divesification

Chapter 4 is dedicated to analyzing and classify the diffent trading strategies (short term, medium-long term, grid trading and miscellaneous)

Chapter 5 explaing how to select the strategies to be putted in our portfolio based on the type of strategy, the timeframe that they use and the currency pair that they work on (analyzing a little the concept of correlations between them).

Chapter 6 is dedicated to the explainantion of the long process of portfolio testing and otpimization. WIth MT4 things are not easy as we can’t backtest/optimize EAs on multiple pairs so here are also explained a few tricks that can be used to have then a “global” porfolio analysis.

Chapter 7 shows in what MT5 will be better than MT4 and what we can do with it that we actually can’t with MT4. MT5 infact has a more advanced “portfolio” approach.

Chapter 8 is probably one of the most important ones and is dedicated to portfolio balancing. It explains how to control risk and equity curves so that our portfolio gives the smoothest possible equity line. It’ll also analyze the “compatibility” of strategies based on the graphical look of their equity lines. A note about that: with experiece you’ll learn tha the equity line gives you a LOT of informations about the strategy behind it. There are “typical” equity lines that are strictly related to strategies. And each strategy has usually a tupical risk profile.

Chapter 9 teaches you how to run multiple strategies together by focusing on those that are the technical problems related to that (Magic Numbers, settings, profiles, etc).

Chapters 10-11-12 switch the attention from the Metatrader platform to the ZuluTrade platform. It is a sort of “signal service” that can be managed via web. They teach you how to manage a ZuluTrade portfolio and describe you some ready-made ones.

Chapter 13 talks about portfolio and account monitoring

Chapters 14-15 close the ebook talking about signal services and conclusions.

The core of the ebook are chapters 4, 5, 6 and 8. Those 4 chapters will give you many of the informations you need to start analyzing EAs performances and strategies, starting trying to put things together (the right way) and balance them so that the result (the portfolio) gives you a smooth equity line that is our main goal.

 

Most of the steps described in the ebook are the ones I’m taking in building our trading portfolio for 2011 :)

 

The ebook is not cheap ($97) and it’s not a mandatory reading for being a succesful automatic trader, but surely will give you a good starting background.