Escuela de trading: Francisca Serrano’s Guide to Short-Term Investing, Charts and the Stock Market
How does the stock market work? How do you read charts? Is it possible to invest from a personal computer? How do you invest in property? These and other questions are answered in Escuela de trading: Guía de inversión a corto plazo ("Trading School: A Guide to Short-Term Investing") by Francisca Serrano, all with the aim of making short-term profits.
Author: Francisca Serrano Ruiz
Title: Escuela de trading: Guía de inversión a corto plazo (2018)
Format: Spanish paperback (Espasa), 272 pages
Scope: Introduction to trading and short-term investing
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/8467052406 (ASIN 8467052406)
Financial Literacy
The book broadens the reader’s knowledge of the world of investing and provides the information needed to develop their financial culture. It turns mathematical concepts and baffling charts into ideas with a concrete, precise meaning.
Learning from Experience
All the concepts related to the stock market, investing, crowdfunding and more are explained with the help of the author’s own experiences and those of her students, which makes it a quick, understandable and fairly short read.
The Author
Francisca Serrano Ruiz was born in Málaga and studied law in Granada. She began her career in the property sector before turning to the stock market, and in 2009 she founded Trading y Bolsa para Torpes ("Trading and the Stock Market for Dummies"), an online school that teaches beginners. That teaching background shapes the book: it is organised as a course, with each idea building on the previous one, and illustrated with the questions and mistakes of real students.
What Trading Means
Trading, as the book uses the word, means buying and selling financial assets over short periods, days, hours or even minutes, to profit from price movements, rather than investing for the long term in the growth of a company. It relies heavily on technical analysis: reading price charts, such as candlestick charts, identifying trends, support and resistance levels, and using indicators to time entries and exits. The book explains these tools in plain Spanish, along with the practical side: brokers, platforms, orders and commissions.
Managing Risk
Any responsible guide to trading must put risk management first, and this is the part of the book beginners should study most carefully: setting a stop-loss before entering a trade, never risking more than a small percentage of your capital on a single operation, and keeping a record of every trade. The warnings are not theoretical. Since 2018, European regulators have required providers of contracts for difference, a popular product among retail traders, to disclose the percentage of their clients’ accounts that lose money, and those figures are typically high.
Who Should Read It
Readers curious about trading who want to understand it before opening an account, and those who have already lost money and want to know why. It is not a promise of easy profits, and it is best read alongside a long-term investing classic such as Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, reviewed on this blog. The book has also been reissued in a pocket edition.
A Practical Tip
Before trading with real money, most brokers offer demo accounts that let you practise with virtual funds. Use one for several months, following the book’s rules and recording every operation, and only move to real money, in small amounts, if your results are consistently positive. Many people discover in the demo stage that short-term trading is not for them, which is a cheap and valuable lesson.
Who Is It For?
It is aimed at beginners who want to understand the basics before risking any money. As always with trading, remember that short-term speculation carries a real risk of loss. I have not found an English edition, so I link the Spanish one.
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Part of the reading recommendations featured on books.sapiensverbum.com.
