Leveraged Trading: A professional approach to trading FX, stocks on margin, CFDs, spread bets and futures for all traders

I bought this book as a recommendation from Andreas Clenow, author of 3 systematic books that I have read. This book complements Andreas' books in a few interesting ways. Robert Carver shows you how to do systematic trading the professional way with as few a 1 product, whereas Andreas presents portfolio trading with 30+ positions. There are things that I have taken from both of them. I am the author of Pinkfish, an opensource Python backtesting library.This book has a heavy emphasis on cost and risk analysis. These are areas that professionals focus on but retail traders often ignore or get entirely wrong. I'm grateful to Mr. Carver for sharing this with us retail traders. My impression is that normally the people that know this stuff are unable or unwilling to share. The big firms would rather keep those on the outside in the dark. Mr Carver is very careful and meticulous. He has methods for evaluating everything. I've just never seen many of the formulas and methods anywhere else. The hardback book itself is very nice, font-wise easy to read, and well organized.Now for a few critiques. (1) U.S. citizens should be aware that there are some products listed in the book that you can't trade legally, e.g. CFDs. It isn't clear enough within the book that these are off limits. (2) Some values are listed in non-us dollars. (3) Probably the most important thing I learned about in the whole book is the concept of Half Kelly. Before that, the author lists a number of other considerations when selecting target risk. It would be better to put Half Kelly up front and recommend it, then only briefly mention the other things. (4) Many of the tables in the book were generated with back testing. If you are going with the starter system (which I'm not), then you have what you need. Otherwise, you'll need to do quit a bit of work to come up with some of the values you'll need to develop your own trading strategy with his techniques, e.g. stop loss calculation. (5) Finally, while I thought the discussion of spreads was interesting, I'm skeptical that it's a good idea to delay closing a position to capture such small amounts. It would take only one bad closing trade to wipe out all the good ones. Although I trust Mr. Carver is capable of pulling it off, I doubt most traders can.In sum, if you are into systematic trading, you need this book.Update 11-27-2020:I often use this book for a reference. I consider it one of my top 5 financial books. I would give it an additional star if I could. I'm considering purchasing his other book now. Mr Carver, thank you!

This book provides a professional approach to profitably trading well-diversified portfolios with small account sizes. It is a must-read for retail traders. Make sure to buy the print version, as it may become your main trading reference book.The type of material discussed in the book is in general is very scarce over the internet. There's very little information out there on how to best use instruments available to retail traders in an effective way: CFDs, spread bets, FX, stocks, ETFs and Futures. Each market/instrument may have similar expectation before costs, but the trading costs can be widely different. The focus on costs is key to success as a retail trader, but it is ignored in most of the literature. This book explains trading costs in great detail. This book lets retail traders cut through the large amount if misinformation found online, and helps set the expectations straight.I spent a few years carefully crafting my strategies to maximize diversification (commodities, bonds, STIR, equity, volatility, currencies and crypto) on my individual portfolio, discovering stuff by myself and making many mistakes. I wish I had this book years ago to shorten my learning curve. This book finally lays it all out for everyone to avoid those mistakes. I've improved my strategies thanks to it. Thanks Rob!

This is a great book on systematic trading, applicable to all trading, not just leveraged trading. His chapter on starter trading system is worth the price of book. It is easy to implement and you can visually see how it performs on a chart. You need a charting program like Amibroker, Tradestation etc. If you are trading, you shouldn't be without this book.

Good book with clear and technical explaination

The third book from Rob Carver doesn't disappoint. This book dives into the world of leveraged trading for smaller retail trading accounts, approaching a tricky and often misunderstood subject from a professional point of view. He goes over critical points such as cost analysis and risk management, providing complete trading models and explaining all the details. If you're trading your own money, either for a living or as a hobby, this book should be mandatory reading.

Purchased this when I first started trading a couple of years ago. It was highly useful and thorough. I still find it useful from time to time. I've highlighted sections in there and have gone back to reread plenty of times.

Despite of the the starts given, I believe this book is a good one for people starting their trading careers, or who would like to precisely design their trades with every cent calculated. The information is good, however for my personal taste it was rather academic in a number of chapters. But then yet again I was wishing for a more comprehensive trading system.The trading system in itself (which is based on a 16 + 64 day moving average crossover) can be described on half page maximum. Really. Which some say is the best tradign system, because it's simple. But then this whole book could have been written in a much concise way, without the additional details ....

This is a better written version of the author's Systematic Trading for retail traders. There is no get rich quick schemes here, no secret patterns nor open / exit rules. The author stresses on practical position / portfolio sizing so novice traders won't blow up their account. He walks through the trading process with great details. In my knowledge, no trading books actually do that, so this is a very unique book.

When I was in college, I started trading Brazilian futures. After struggling for a while, I gave up trading temporarily, but I was hooked. The reasons of my initial failure are very common among beginners . Amateur traders very often make three serious mistakes: over-betting, overtrading and disregarding trading costs. These errors usually lead to financial ruin. In this book, Robert Carver meticulously introduces a professional method to trading which benefits even beginner traders with small accounts.The first part of the book describes the different kinds of leveraged products available and how trading systems work.In the next part, he introduces the so-called "Starter system", which is a basic trading system with a single trading instrument and a single trading rule. He explains step-by-step how to select the best instrument, when to open and close positions (stop-loss), and how to calculate the optimal position size.He then expands the "Starter system" by adding multiple instruments and multiple trading rules. He discusses the trade-offs involved in this expansion.In the final part, he drops the stop-loss and show how to adjust position size according to the confidence in the signal and short-term volatility.I wish I had read a book like this when I was starting my trading. It would have saved me a lot of time and money. Highly recommended!

I design trading systems for a living and trade my own capital with some small success and many failures along the way. Mr Carver has removed the wool from my eyes. To my great shame I’ve been doing it completely, absolutely, irredeemably wrong for 14 years. Let me explain. The retail trading world almost universally uses an approximation for estimating risk, usually defined as the amount you lose if your trade hits a stop loss, multiplied by some fraction of your account (usually .5-2%) Mr Carver proves beyond any doubt that this is an approximation which does not work. He also explains why nearly all trading systems are curve fitted to some extent, and goes a long way to try and avoid basic sins. I’m grateful that Rob Carver exists, this knowledge, which is commonplace in the professional finance world, was completely unavailable to retail traders just a few years ago. Without this stuff (proper risk management and position sizing framework) you are almost certain to blow up your account. Bravo!

Ich habe mir das Buch vor ca. 3 Jahren gekauft. Vom Autor wird ein Haldelssystem mit einer Einstiegsregel (64/16) vorgestellt, im weiteren Verlauf kommen noch weitre Einstiege dazu um die Performance zu verbessern, man kann das System mit unterschiedlichen Finanzprodukten Aktien/Futures/CFDs handeln. Der Autor schlägt vor das Traidingkapital zu teilen und mehrere unterschiedliche Positionen zu handeln. Die Dersivikation soll die Performance signifikant verbessern. usw.So weit so gut.So habe ich mit der Hälfte meines Traidingskapitals zwischen 10 bis 15 unterschiedliche Aktien in Europa/USA/Japan in der Zeit von 2021 bis Ende 2023 nach seinen Vorschlägen gehandelt. Die andere Hälfte wurde in drei ETFS Europa/USA/Asien, drei solide Aktien (nach fundamentalen Kriterien ausgewählt, KGV, KCV, Umsatzwachstum usw.), sowie zwei Anleihen ETFs aufgeteilt. Heute im Jahr 2024 kann ich zusammenfassend sagen: -Traiding nach Vorschlägen des Autors war sehr zeitaufwendig- die Perfomance war mehr als enttäuschend- ich hatte teilweise 4-5 Verlusttrades in Folge, bevor ein Profitabler Trade kam.Die zweite Hälfte meines Portfolios hat um Längen besser abgeschnitten als das System des Autors. So entschied ich mich am Anfang 2024 alle Positionen, die nach seinem System gehandelt wurden, zu schlissen.