Robson - Currency kings: how billionaire traders made their fortune trading forex and how you can too

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T heres a book in everyone, I was once told. And this is mine. The journey to writing this book started long before I embarked upon a career in the financial markets. And there are many people who have helped shape the course of my life and who deserve a share of the credit for this piece of work.

I will start with mentors: Clive Hawes, Larry OConnell, Michelle Garnier-Chedotal, Lorna Almonds-Windmill, Jonathan Cook, Barry Hannen, David Foley and Simon Raybould.

If I then move on to those who have helped me at various stages during my financial markets career (some are mentioned above), then I would like to add Richard Plane, Richard Craddock, and Frank Lentini. There are others who added color and opinion to Currency Kings for which Id like to thank Mark Davison, Mark O Neill, Ross Donaghue, Peter Nesden, Moorthy Sadasivam, Vinish Ramanathan, Vivek Premkumar, John Ramkin, Jim Berlino, Rakesh Daryani, Harish Pawani, and Badre Maktari. A special thank-you to David Hastings and Tradermade for creating some charts and to Edward Wright for my portrait photo.

I especially wish to thank my agent, Jeanne Glasser Levine. Also, Donya Dickerson, Daina Penikas, Marci Nugent, Mauna Eichner and Lee Fukui, and the team at McGraw-Hill for all their hard work in getting this book to press.

Lastly, a small word for my family. To my wife Saskia and my daughters Sophie and Paloma. Thank you for your patience.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in the forex (FX) market for more than 20 years. I say lucky because I have always found the market fascinating, dynamic, and often exhilarating. It is a massive marketsome $5.3 trillion in FX transactions is traded each day. The market ebbs, it flows, and then in an instant, it can spike and retrace or continue to move in truly Brownian fashion. There are so many factors that may influence a pair of currencies, and there are thousands of traders pitching their wits (and cash) in the relentless pursuit of profits and perhaps perfection.

There are some who argue that luck plays a great part in the success or failure of any particular trader or philosophy. There are several theories that support this contention. And it is perhaps applicable to the vast majority of FX participants. But there is a breed of traders who reject this generalization and quite rightly base their educated, risk-adjusted wagers on something a bit more certain than luck. Some of these people either are already Currency Kings or are on the right track to become future Currency Kings.

If I were to fully define what I mean by a Currency King, it would be an individual who has made multimillions or billions in the FX marketplace by scaling up a legitimate competitive advantage. The marketplace in my mind encompasses spot, futures, forwards, and options as products and also technology and innovation as a means to access and penetrate the market either in a trading capacity or as an enabler of trading. The traders, speculators, market makers, and technology providers you will read about have all made fortunes in the FX marketplace, and some are integral to the market as it is today.

Going back through my 20-plus years as a foreign exchange dealer and trader, there are people, places, and events that have led me to believe that markets can be beaten. In a transactional sense, wealth is transferred from A to B and markets are efficient, as Professor Eugene Fama and his efficient market hypothesis suggests. But there are many instances when markets are inefficient or predictable to a degree, where the odds of a payoff are not equal and therefore favor one particular outcome over another, and there are traders out there who consistently beat the odds. I have witnessed this, and it has inspired me.