Technical analyst Christopher Weaver has spent extensive time trading and studying the trends and movements of the foreign exchange market. With his new book, 4 Keys to Profitable Forex Trend Trading, available via Harriman House, Weaver aims to teach that forex trading is accessible to anyone willing to commit the time and effort needed to master the market. It's a valuable, informative, and chart-packed book, and a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in trading forex.
Benzinga spoke to Weaver to find out more about the book, his career, and what he is up to now.
Can you give us a little background on you and your career to date?
My career in finance started doing mortgage advice for property investors. I considered it low level finance at the time, although I was actually structuring finance across an investor's property portfolio. They would come to me with so many properties and I would advise on the most efficient way to structure the property costs across the portfolio. That got me excited about the idea of portfolio management, which took me a little bit further into finance. I ended up learning about forex training. Through networking, I ended up meeting a guy who runs training courses in London, and I ended up working on foreign exchange on his trading floor. Then I ended up teaching some of the traders on the trading floor some of the strategies that I learned along the way that were working quite well. From there, I began to teach trading courses to retail traders. That ultimately led to writing the book.
It is very technical and not easy reading at all. Who is the book for?
The book is really for people who want to consistently make money trading the foreign exchange. If you are a complete beginner and you've never trader forex at all, you're probably going to need an introduction somewhere else because it doesn't cover the most basic things like placing a trade, but if you're a guy who understands a little bit about the stock market, how to place an order ticket, then the book is for you really. Ultimately, the book is for people who want to know how to trade with the trend. A lot of the book goes into determining what the trend is, so even if you don't like to trade with the trend, I still think the book can be helpful because it helps you identify a trend. Once you know which direction the trend is, if you like to trade against the trend, it's pretty clear which way you should be trading at that point. It's for anyone who's interested in trading, for anyone who's interested in making money on a long-term basis from trading, and who's interested in actually having a very specific plan to their trading as opposed to being kind of like a ?gut feel? sort of trader.
It is packed with charts?
That's the point. For me really, trading is very visual. It's looking at charts and determining what to do technically. What I wanted to do with the book was kind of get people's eye trained to seeing charts, so that when they actually look at the charts themselves, they will be able to see a channel or a trend line. There are over 250 charts in the book, and I think that makes sense because, if you're teaching someone how to trade, and they are identifying set-ups by looking at a chart, then the book should give you examples of what these images should look like.
So you split forex trading into four keys areas to simplify it?
To trade foreign exchange successfully, you don't need 15 different strategies. At the end of every chapter, it says something like, if you only choose to use the strategies on trend lines, or channels, you would be ok. It breaks it into chunks. You don't need all the strategies. What it gives you is an understanding of each one so you can begin to implement them and eventually pick up a feel. It's meant to give you a way of going through the book and picking the strategy for you.
OK, so where do you see the dollar going?
The way that I trade is that I determine the trend first. For me, the most common currency pair that I trade is euro/U.S. dollar. Right now, that's a downward trend so I'm shorting that. I'm surprised we didn't get more resistance at 1.30 ? it kind of bounced off and is trading above that right now. I don't necessarily have a direction on the dollar, but I will have a direction on currency pairs that I'm trading. When I look at the euro/U.S. dollar, I'm still shorting that. Same with sterling/U.S. dollar. U.S./Swiss franc currency pair ? I'm long on that.
What are your thoughts on the euro sovereign debt?
I think the main thing that has to get sorted out at the moment is what's happening in Greece. I think Greece is trying to get a central bank to help out more than it's willing to. To be honest, my style of trading is very technical. I wouldn't spend too much time digging into all that. I think it's one of those things where there are plenty of arguments for all different sides. If you look at the stock market, I've been working with a brokerage company that trades European stocks, the stocks are doing ok this year so far, but I think it's priced in a lot of the uncertainty. When you're buying equities, there's some decent value out there. I focus on the charts, I determine the trend on the chart, because I think that, with fundamental trading, there are far more variables than when trading technically.
Is there anything you'd like to add?
I honestly think that, if you read the book and spend time focusing on what I'm saying about each chart, it will change the way you trade. There are so many charts in this book because you need to train your mind to identify the direction of a trend. One of the reasons I wanted to write a book on trending is because when I was teaching these courses to investors, to retail traders, I would ask them which way they were looking to trade a currency pair. They would say, ?if this happens I'm looking to trade it long, if that happens I'm looking to trade it short'. People were so confused from the very beginning, they were unable to say which way they wanted to trade the currency pair in. For me, I believe that knowing the trend and knowing the direction, as simple as it sounds, is at least 80 percent of the battle.
