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59 lessons
Foundations
Risk Management 101: Position Sizing & the 1% Rule
Why how much you risk matters more than how often you're right — and a simple formula to size every trade.
Understanding R-Multiples & Expectancy
Stop thinking in euros and start thinking in R. One number tells you if your strategy actually makes money.
Trading Psychology: Beating FOMO and Revenge Trades
The two emotions that wreck more accounts than any bad strategy — and a concrete routine to disarm them.
Reading Market Sessions: Asia, London & New York
Liquidity and volatility move around the clock. Knowing which session you're in tells you what to expect.
Building & Reviewing a Trading Strategy
A strategy is a repeatable, written set of rules — not a feeling. Here's how to define, test, and refine one.
Risk Management
Kelly & Fractional Kelly: Sizing for Growth Without Ruin
The famous bet-sizing formula that maximises long-run growth — and why almost nobody should use it at full strength.
Where to Put Your Stop (and Why ‘Mental Stops’ Fail)
How to place a stop at a level the market has to actually break — and why keeping it only in your head rarely survives a losing trade.
Drawdown, Risk of Ruin & Losing Streaks
What drawdown really measures, why a string of losers is normal even with a good edge, and how to size so a cold streak can't end you.
Sizing by Volatility (ATR) Instead of Fixed Shares
Why a fixed number of shares quietly hands you wildly different risk on each trade — and how sizing off recent volatility fixes it.
Performance Metrics
Win Rate vs Payoff: The Trade-off That Fools Everyone
A high win rate feels like proof you're good — but on its own it tells you almost nothing about whether you make money.
Sharpe, Sortino & Calmar in Plain English
Three ratios the pros use to judge returns against risk — translated into something a retail trader can actually use.
Profit Factor, MAE & MFE: Reading Your Own Trades
Three journal metrics that turn a pile of closed trades into a clear story about your entries, exits, and stop placement.
Trading Psychology
Loss Aversion & the Disposition Effect (Why You Cut Winners)
Losses hurt about twice as much as equal gains feel good — so we grab small wins and nurse big losers. Here's the wiring, and how to fight it.
Overconfidence & Overtrading: The Turnover Tax
The more retail traders trade, the worse they tend to do. Overconfidence quietly funds a 'turnover tax' of spreads, fees, and slippage.
8 Biases That Wreck Trades (Anchoring, Recency, Confirmation)
A field guide to the mental shortcuts that quietly distort your trading — what each one feels like at the screen, and the journal habit that counters it.
Tilt: Spotting & Breaking the Emotional Spiral
Tilt is the loss-driven spiral where standards collapse and one red trade becomes five. Learn the early warning signs and a concrete circuit-breaker.
Discipline & Process
Find Your Style: Scalp, Day, Swing or Position
Your edge starts with a style that fits your time, capital, and temperament. Here's the honest map of scalping, day, swing, and position trading.
Do Retail Traders Actually Make Money?
The honest answer, from the largest studies ever done: most active retail traders lose. Here's the evidence — and the narrow path the survivors walk.
Keeping a Journal That Actually Improves You
A trade journal isn't a diary — it's the feedback loop that turns random outcomes into a real edge. Here's how to keep one that works.
The Weekly Trade Review Routine
Logging trades is half the job. The weekly review is where the lessons actually land. A simple, repeatable routine to run every week.
The 10 Most Common (and Costly) Mistakes
Most blown accounts die from the same short list of mistakes. Learn to recognise all ten — and the journal habit that catches each one.
Data Sources & Avoiding Garbage-In/Garbage-Out
Every decision you make is only as good as the data behind it. How to pick reliable sources and spot the bad data that quietly wrecks a strategy.
Market Structure
Bid/Ask Spread, Liquidity & Slippage
The price you see is not the price you get. Here's how the spread, thin liquidity, and slippage quietly eat your edge — one trade at a time.
Reading Order Flow & the Tape (Basics)
The tape is the live record of every trade and the resting orders around it. A retail-friendly intro to what order flow can — and can't — tell you.
The Intraday U-Shape: When Volume & Volatility Cluster
Volatility at the open is a different animal than at lunch. The trading day follows a near-daily clock — here's how to trade with it instead of against it.
Technical Analysis
Support, Resistance & Trend: Does TA Actually Work?
An honest look at what technical analysis can and can't do — and how to use levels to define rules instead of predict the future.
Chart Patterns: What the Evidence Says
Head-and-shoulders, double bottoms, triangles — what formal studies found, why results disagree, and how to trade patterns as rules.
Moving Averages & Momentum Signals
Moving averages, crossovers and momentum — which of these hold up in the research, which are fragile, and how to use them as rules.
Mean Reversion vs Trend Following: Two Edges
The two great families of price strategy pull in opposite directions. Knowing which one you're trading — and when — is half the battle.
Execution
Market, Limit, Stop & Stop-Limit Orders
The four order types every trader uses — what each one promises, what it costs you, and when to reach for which.
Maker vs Taker: Fees, Rebates & Why They Add Up
Posting liquidity and taking it are billed differently. Here's what that means for a retail trader and why small per-trade costs compound.
Cutting Transaction Costs at Retail Scale
Why speed is not the retail edge, where your real costs hide, and the handful of levers that actually move your net returns.
Strategy
From Idea to Live: The Strategy Lifecycle
Every strategy worth trading passes through the same stages — idea, test, paper, live. Skipping one is how good ideas lose money.
Backtesting Pitfalls: Overfitting & Look-Ahead Bias
A backtest is the easiest thing in trading to fake — usually without meaning to. Here are the two traps that turn a great-looking curve into a money loser.
How Many Trades Until You Know? Sample Size & Luck
Ten green trades feel like proof you've cracked it. They aren't. Here's how to tell skill from luck — and how big a sample you actually need.
Paper Trading Without Fooling Yourself
Paper trading is the safest way to test a strategy and the easiest to do uselessly. Here's how to make a demo account tell you the truth.
Walk-Forward Testing & Out-of-Sample Discipline
The gold-standard way to test a strategy without fooling yourself: never let it see the data you judge it on. Translated for the retail trader.
Portfolio & Allocation
Correlation: Why ‘10 Trades’ Can Be One Bet
Holding ten positions feels diversified — but if they all move together, you really have one big trade. How correlation decides your true risk.
Sizing a Book of Strategies
Once you run more than one strategy, ‘how big per trade?’ becomes three different questions. A retail-friendly map of how the pros layer them.
Margin, Leverage & Short Selling: The Mechanics
Borrowing buying power and selling shares you don't own have real plumbing behind them — margin calls, borrow fees, locates. What every retail trader should know first.
Forex
FX Pairs, Pips & Lot Sizes
Before you can risk a sensible amount on a EUR/USD trade you need to read a quote, count a pip, and know what a lot is actually worth.
The Carry Trade & Why It Crashes
Borrow a low-yield currency, hold a high-yield one, and pocket the interest difference — a strategy that pays for years and then unravels in days.
FX Sessions & What Moves Major Pairs
Currencies trade around the clock, but liquidity and volatility move with the sun — and each major pair dances to its own fundamental driver.
Futures
Futures 101: Contracts, Margin & Leverage
What a futures contract actually is, why margin lets a small account control a large position, and why that leverage cuts both ways.
Contango, Backwardation & Roll Yield
Why a futures price differs from today's spot, what the shape of the futures curve tells you, and how rolling contracts quietly adds or subtracts return.
Tick Size, Tick Value & Sizing Futures Risk
How a futures contract turns price ticks into dollars, and how to convert your stop distance into real risk before you ever click buy.
Options
Calls, Puts & Payoff Diagrams
What a call and a put actually are, the four basic positions, and how to read a payoff diagram before you ever place an options trade.
The Greeks: Delta, Gamma, Theta, Vega
The four numbers that tell you how an option's price will move — with price, with time, and with volatility — explained without the calculus.
Implied Volatility & IV Crush Around Earnings
Why options get expensive before earnings, why they can lose value the morning after even when you're right on direction, and how to think about the volatility risk premium.
Income Strategies: Covered Calls & Cash-Secured Puts
Two defined-risk ways to collect option premium against stock you own or cash you've set aside — plus an honest look at what you give up and what can go wrong.
Crypto
Perpetuals & Funding Rates Explained
A perpetual swap is a futures contract that never expires — and the funding rate is the toll that keeps its price glued to spot.
Stablecoins: Types & Depeg Risk
The dollar you hold on-chain is a promise, not cash — and promises can break. Knowing what backs each stablecoin is risk management.
DeFi Yield, Impermanent Loss & Liquidation Cascades
On-chain yield is never free — it is payment for risks most retail traders never name. Here are the three that bite hardest.
Keeping Coins Safe: Custody & Key Management
In crypto you can be a perfect trader and still lose everything to a lost key or a failed exchange. Custody is the risk nobody trains for.
Macro
The Fed, Rate Decisions & Why Markets Care
Eight days a year, one committee moves the price of money — and everything reprices around it. A plain-English guide to what the Fed does and why your charts lurch when it speaks.
CPI, Jobs & the Calendar That Moves Markets
A handful of scheduled data releases deliver an outsized chunk of the year's market moves. Here's what CPI, the jobs report, and the calendar actually measure — and why surprises matter more than levels.
The VIX: Reading the ‘Fear Gauge’
The VIX is built from what traders pay for options — a live read on how much turbulence the market expects. Here's what it measures, why it usually runs high, and how to use it without getting fooled.
Risk-On / Risk-Off: Trading the Regime
Markets cycle between a greedy 'risk-on' mood and a fearful 'risk-off' one — and in the panic, the diversification you counted on quietly disappears. How to recognize the regime and respect what it does to correlation.
Calendar Effects & the Pre-FOMC Drift
Some of the market's return has historically clustered in oddly specific windows — most famously the hours before a Fed meeting. A grounded tour of which calendar effects were real, and why the famous ones fade.