'The Beginner's Guide to Financial Spread Betting', by Michelle Baltazar, £12.99 from Harriman House (the T2W bookshop links here I believe) is new out - like I suspect others it covers the mechanics so that a newbie (as I was) could follow and understand how to do it. This info is doubtless available on the web, but like many topics it's doubtless a case of 30,000 google hits where 10 of them are all you want to know. I would not buy a book with this title if I wanted a trading tactic - I would buy a book called 'Good ideas for making money in TA' or similar... trading is a very specialised area, the person who knows how to describe the mechanics of SB will probably not be Ace of the Base in psychology or TA.
I got a copy, it took 2 hours to read, I was then confident of the mechanics - does this matter? Yes - one thing holding me back was the worry that I might misunderstand something, I'd lose a grand and be told that 'everyone knows that'. (As an example how worried were you the first time you read the words 'ex-dividend'? Wouldn't you have paid a fiver at that point to learn what, if any, relevance it had to investing?)
There are probably better things to read, and if you have days to kill then search the web - this is a short cut to feeling safer for newbies who have £13 to spare.
Is it any good for an experienced type looking for trading ideas? No, it covers the mechanics of a leveraged trade instrument - to pick the trade itself buy a good TA book instead, or go on a course. I imagine other books with similar titles cover similar ground, anyone who is new to this as I was should follow it up by coming back to T2W to read the spreadbet threads etc to find a decent spreads company to use when ready - the reviews section on T2W persuaded me to look at an outfit other than the one used in the book to illustrate each point.
For Deskpro - I would buy this or a similar book for a reference, to check I got the purely mechanical side right. I would then buy a book like Nison's candlestick patterns book(s), or a decent P&F book, or Jiler's charting book (etc) and probably a book on getting my head into shape by Elder or Mark Douglas. (Leave out any that duplicate areas you are already good in). SB'ing is just a way to handle the money, I would totall ignore most 'how to trade' sections in such a book as their purpose is to make the page count large enough to justify the cover price.
Dave