The forex forums are full of "noooo! don't trade forex! It's an unregulated scam/bucket shop/etc. Trade currency futures instead!!!" So tell me why I should do this. What is the difference? Is this market open 24 hours a day then like the forex market? Can I get a practice account somewhere? Do forex trading strategies work in with currency futures?
A useful mantra when someone mentions the word "should" in a trading context: http://tinyurl.com/3295zo In fact, a useful mantra if you start to take ET seriously.
I'm not making an argument either way, but I did want to address one part of your question. I currently trade the currency futures and not spot, mainly because I've been doing things that way for years. However I recently had a potential client ask me to backtest my system on spot as opposed to futures data to see if there was much difference. The backtest gave a slight edge to the spot, but not much, I guess I'm saying from what I saw, there wasn't much difference performance wise between the futures and the spot market, at least on a backtest of data.
I trade both. Primarily because of commission cost. If you are trading with a broker that makes his money off the spread, that becomes a large cost. Using IB, I place a 100,000 unit buy order for the Euro Spot (forex), Commission cost $2.89. Spread is 1 pip. if you are doing 2 pips or more thats crazy.... Same contract size via CME (futures) - 6EH8 runs approx $3.40 USD in commish with a one pip spread.
I am really a novice at the forex market so I ran both the futures and spot assuming no slippage and no commissions, probably not the best real world way to do this for real world trading, but I figured it was OK for comparison sake between the two.
That looks like an awesome book, but I don't care what other people think, I just care if other people have information that may be advantageous to me (ie. forex is a scam because x, y, and z and I should trade currency futures instead).
You're asking why you should trade futures as opposed to a scam forex market? I don't get it. The difference is that one is a scam and the other isn't, right? Do you know the difference between an ECN model for forex trading and a bucket shop model? If not, you should find out. Maybe someone here will have the time to post an explanation for you, but it would probably be better if you did the searches necessary. You can trade forex but I believe you need to make sure you're doing it through an ECN, like IB has for its IdealPRO trading (not sure about Ideal, please do your own DD). Hopefully someone who knows more than I will give you the details, but I would have thought that if you read a bunch of different people saying 'retail forex is a bucket shop scam' (which it clearly is - after all, you are trading against your broker and getting your quotes from the broker as well - sound fishy?), then you would simply avoid retail forex?
Forex is for suckers who are attracted to bright lights.. Trade futures - fully regulated, all stops honored, no broker dealers gunning for your stops..