A retail forex broker's in-house study guide that walks through Forex market structure, fundamental indicators, and standard technical indicators with their formulas. It never assembles any of that into a tradeable method, and its own bibliography admits most of the technical chapters are paraphrased from Cornelius Luca's books.
The one idea
The book is a 69-page reference document, not a trading philosophy. It moves through what Forex is (spot, forward, futures, options markets and their relative volumes), the five major currencies of 2001, how interbank dealing worked through brokers and dealing systems, then a run of macro indicators (GNP, GDP, PPI, CPI, nonfarm payrolls, retail sales) with their reporting schedule and typical weightings.
The second half is a technical analysis primer: Dow Theory's trend classification, chart types (line, bar, candlestick), trendlines and channels, then a catalog of indicators with their actual formulas: moving averages, envelopes, Bollinger Bands, Average True Range, CCI, DMI/ADX, stochastic, MACD, Momentum, RSI, Rate of Change, Williams %R, and Ichimoku Kinko Hyo. It closes with two pages on Fibonacci retracement ratios and the Elliott Wave rules.
There is no synthesis. Every section defines a tool and states its textbook overbought/oversold threshold, then moves on. The book never combines two of these into one entry rule, never shows a stop-loss calculation, and never runs a single worked trade from signal to exit.
What it actually teaches
The book has no sequential trading method; it hands the reader four separate components a trader is expected to assemble on their own.
TREND CLASSIFICATION (DOW THEORY)
The market has three nested trends: primary (about a year), intermediate (a month or more), and minor (days to weeks). A primary trend runs through accumulation, run-up/run-down, and distribution phases. The secondary trend is a correction that retraces one-third, one-half, or two-thirds of the primary move; anything beyond two-thirds is read as a trend change rather than a pullback.
CHANNEL AND BREAK RULES
Draw a trendline from two points and confirm it with a third contact point; the parallel line on the other side of price forms a trade channel. Five stated rules govern how much to trust a channel: older channels (over about a year) get less reliable, wider channels are harder to break, resistance needs rising volume to break ('it takes volume to break resistance'), a steep channel is less reliable than a gentle one, and support can fail on its own without a volume spike ('under own weight').
OSCILLATOR THRESHOLDS
Each oscillator gets a fixed numeric band. RSI (usually 14-day) = 100 - [100/(1+RS)], with 70/30 as a warning zone and above 85 / below 15 as the overbought/oversold triggers. Stochastic %K = [(CCL-L9)/(H9-L9)] x 100 against a 9-period range, %D as its smoothed version, with 70/30 warnings and 90/10 as the actual reversal signal. CCI flags overbought above +100 and oversold below -100. ADX (from the DMI, 14-day) runs 0 to 50: below 20 means no clear trend, a rise above 20 signals a trend starting, and an ADX that was above 40 and turns down signals the trend is exhausting.
FIBONACCI AND ELLIOTT RETRACEMENT LEVELS
Three separate retracement grids are given as alternatives, not reconciled: Dow's reversal points at one-third, one-half, and two-thirds of the prior move; Fibonacci's at 38.2%, 50%, and 61.8%; and Gann's at every one-eighth increment. The Elliott Wave rules layered on top: a five-wave move with the trend followed by a three-wave correction, wave 2 can never retrace more than 100% of wave 1, wave 3 is never the shortest of the three impulse waves, and wave 4 can never enter the price territory of wave 1.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader walks away with a checklist of indicator settings to punch into whatever charting platform they use: 4/9/18-day moving average crossovers, a 14-day RSI and ATR, a 20-day Bollinger Band, and Dow's channel-reliability rules for filtering which breakouts to trust. That is a legitimate starting toolkit for someone who has never opened a forex chart.
What it will not produce is a plan. The book gives no rule for which of these indicators to use together, no position sizing, and no stop-loss method beyond the general idea of placing a stop below a Fibonacci retracement level. A reader still has to build the actual system themselves, from a different source.
| Indicator | Formula / period | Overbought / sell | Oversold / buy |
|---|---|---|---|
| RSI | 100 - [100/(1+RS)], 14-day | Above 85% | Below 15% |
| Stochastic %K | [(CCL-L9)/(H9-L9)] x 100, 9-period | Above 90% | Below 10% |
| CCI | Mean price minus average mean price | Above +100 | Below -100 |
| ADX (from DMI) | 0-50 scale, 14-day | Falling from above 40 (trend exhausting) | Below 20 (no trend) |
The book gives no rule for combining these into a single entry signal.
The higher the number, the better the trend potential of a movement, and vice versa.Royal Forex, Successful Foreign Exchange Dealing
Where it fails
- No author is credited, and the technical chapters are an admitted paraphrase. The copyright page reads only '2001 by Royal Forex,' a retail forex broker. The book's own References section names Cornelius Luca's 'Trading in the Global Currency Markets' (2nd edition, New York Institute of Finance, 1999) and 'Technical Analysis Applications in the Global Currency Market' as its two sources, and long stretches of the fundamental and technical chapters track Luca's structure and phrasing closely. This is broker marketing collateral dressed as a study book, not an original author's method.
- Its market-structure numbers are frozen at 2000-2001 and are now wrong. Daily forex turnover is stated as having 'stabilized at around $1.5 trillion by the year 2000'; the BIS put daily turnover above $7.5 trillion by 2022. The dealing description centers on phone brokers using open microphone boxes and separate 'matching systems' introduced in April 1993, a market structure electronic ECNs and algorithmic liquidity have since displaced.
- No worked trade, no risk management, no position sizing anywhere in 69 pages. Every indicator section ends at a static threshold (RSI above 85, ADX below 20, CCI above +100) and then moves to the next indicator. Nothing in the book shows a signal turning into an entry, a stop, and an exit, and nothing addresses how much of an account to risk on any one trade.
- It is written around one specific broker's software, not general trading. The chart, envelope, and Ichimoku sections repeatedly reference 'the program RoyalForex allows...' or 'in the program RoyalForex.' This confirms the book functioned as onboarding material for Royal Forex's own trading platform rather than platform-neutral instruction.
- The macro-indicator chapter is a stale, US-centric list even for 2001. It leans on GNP alongside GDP, cites capacity utilization at '81.5 percent' as the 'normal' baseline for a steady economy, and gives specific release times (8:30 and 10 AM ET) as fixed facts. The US had already shifted its primary output measure to GDP through the 1990s, and none of the release-time or weighting figures reflect how those indicators are reported today.
- The text has uncorrected contradictions and duplicated passages. The Directional Movement Index section defines both +DI and -DI as 'the positive directional indicator' in consecutive sentences. The Williams %R section states bullish reversals occur below 80% and bearish reversals above 20%, an overlapping range that cannot both be true as written. The 'Retail Sales' and 'Consumer Spending Indicators' passages repeat nearly verbatim within two pages of each other. None of this reads as a professionally edited trading book.
Who it is for
Buy it if
You want a free, one-sitting glossary of standard forex terminology, chart types, and the exact formulas behind common indicators like RSI, stochastic, MACD, CCI, DMI, and Ichimoku before you go shopping for a real trading book. It is a reasonable primer for someone who has never looked at a currency chart.
Skip it if
You are looking for an actual trading system, a backtested edge, risk management rules, or original research. Skip it if you already know what RSI, MACD, and Fibonacci retracements are, since there is nothing here past the textbook definitions, and skip it if outdated broker-era market structure will annoy you.
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