Books
- 50 Trades in 50 Weeks
- Alpha Trader
- Art of Currency Trading
50 Trades in 50 Weeks: One year of good ideas, dumb mistakes, and timeless trading lessons - NOW AVAILABLE!
50 Trades in 50 Weeks: One year of good ideas, dumb mistakes, and timeless trading lessons
Hi, I’m Brent Donnelly. This is 50 Trades in 50 Weeks.
Over the years, many have asked me for a detailed, start-to-finish walkthrough of my process and framework for selecting and executing trades. 50in50 uses the business school case study method to go through fifty(ish) real-time trades in detail. The idea first came to life as a blog on Substack, and this two-book series is a permanent record of the weekly process that spanned from February 2022 to May 2023. Each week, I shared a new trade idea and walked readers through my thought process. Lessons include a wide range of topics like global macro, technicals, backtesting, correlation, narrative analysis, mindset, risk management, position sizing, and of course the psychology of successful trading. 50in50 lets you watch real trade ideas come to life in real time. Each trade goes from start to finish, touching on aspects like: Where did the idea come from? Why does it make sense? Narrative Fundamental analysis Technicals Pattern recognition Backtesting Positioning and sentiment Risk management How to choose stop loss and take profit levels. How to determine position size—What is the appropriate amount of risk for this trade? Psychology. How might this trade be ruined by mental errors and bias? The alternative hypothesis What are the risks to the trade and reasons it might not work? Pre-mortem as we imagine the trade going wrong and dissect the worst case before it happens. Data collection. Monitoring and tracking trades. Learning. What have we learned? 50in50 is a 1-year “Introduction to Trading” class full of new ideas, tactics, and strategies for trading. The book follows the trades over time and concludes with takeaways and the many lessons learned along the way. The target audience is traders with 0 to 5 years of experience, but professionals will find the series valuable, too.
Bio - Brent Donnelly
Brent Donnelly has been trading currencies since 1995 and writing about macro since 2004. He is currently President of Spectra Markets. Brent is the author of Alpha Trader (2021) and The Art of Currency Trading (Wiley, 2019). He writes a widely-read and highly-respected macro and FX daily called AM/FX. Over the course of his career, he has been a market maker, trader, and senior manager at some of the top banks in foreign exchange.
He has extensive experience trading currencies, FX options, stock index futures, NASDAQ stocks, and commodities. Brent is a respected macro thinker with the unique perspective of a senior risk taker. He has been quoted by or featured in the Economist, Real Vision, Epsilon Theory, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and CNBC.
Before joining Spectra, Brent was a senior FX trader at HSBC, head of G10 Spot Trading at Citi New York and global head of G10 FX Trading at Nomura New York. He was also a portfolio manager at a major hedge fund in Connecticut for three years. He created and wrote a cartoon called ‘‘Daft Planet,’’ which aired on TV in Canada, and he dreams of one day winning the Man Booker Prize.