Every lessonAll forty-two lessons in the order the course teaches them, and the four routes that take them in a different order. Nothing here needs an account.

Every lesson

01 · Level 1What you press, what it costs, and where your money actually sits. Fifteen lessons, each one answering a question a first-time account holder asks.

Basics: how a trade and an account work

1.1
What happens when you press Buy
An order leaves your platform, gets filled at a price, becomes an open position, and ends when you close it. Four steps, and every cost attaches to one of them.
1.2
Pairs and quotes: what 1.0850 means
A quote is the price of the first currency in the second. The number you see moves in the last decimal place, and that place has a money value.
1.3
What a pip is worth in money
A pip is the smallest standard price step. What it is worth depends on lot size and the pair, so the same twenty-pip move pays differently on different trades.
1.4
Lots: standard, mini and micro
A lot is how much of the instrument one trade controls. Standard is 100,000 units, mini is a tenth of that, micro a hundredth.
1.5
The three costs: spread, commission, swap
You pay the spread on entry, commission on some account types, and swap for every night a position stays open. All three are known before you trade.
1.6
Overnight swap and swap-free accounts
Swap is the daily cost of holding a leveraged position. A swap-free account removes it and usually replaces it with another charge.
1.7
Leverage and margin: how much of the trade is yours
Leverage sets how large a position your deposit can hold. Margin is the part of your money locked against it while the trade is open.
1.8
Order types: market, limit, stop
A market order takes the current price. A limit waits for a better one. A stop triggers once price reaches a worse one.
1.9
Stop loss and take profit
Two instructions you attach to a position: one closes it at a loss you chose in advance, the other at a profit you chose in advance.
1.10
MT4, MT5 and cTrader: which to pick
The three platforms differ in instruments, order handling and how they report costs. The choice is reversible; the account type behind it is less so.
1.11
Trading from a phone
The phone app does everything the desktop one does except show you enough chart. What that changes about your decisions is the lesson.
1.12
Demo accounts: what they teach and where they lie
A demo teaches the platform and the arithmetic honestly. It cannot teach fills in a fast market, and it cannot teach how losing real money feels.
1.13
Account types: standard, raw spread, cent
The same trade costs different amounts on different account types. Raw spread accounts move the cost into commission rather than removing it.
1.14
Opening an account and passing verification
What documents a regulated broker has to ask for, why it has to ask, and the checks that hold an application up.
1.15
Deposits and withdrawals with local methods
Which local payment methods reach a broker, how long each leg takes, and why a withdrawal usually has to go back the way the deposit came.

02 · Level 2What a chart shows, what the usual indicators are for, and how gold, indices and crypto CFDs differ from currency pairs. Fifteen lessons.

Reading the market: charts, tools and instruments

2.1
Charts and timeframes
One market looks like several different markets depending on the timeframe you open. Which one you trade decides what the rest of your plan has to be.
2.2
Candles: what one candle tells you
A candle holds four numbers — open, high, low, close — for one slice of time. Everything read off its shape comes from those four.
2.3
Trend, support and resistance
Where price has turned before is where traders watch next. The levels are not rules; they are places where orders tend to sit.
2.4
Indicators: MA, RSI, MACD, Bollinger
Each of the four is arithmetic on past prices, shown as a line. Knowing which arithmetic tells you what the indicator can and cannot react to.
2.5
Fibonacci levels
A tool that divides a move into fixed proportions. What it actually marks is where a lot of traders have placed the same lines.
2.6
Price action: trading without indicators
Reading the chart from structure — highs, lows, ranges and breaks — instead of from a calculated line.
2.7
Smart money: order blocks, FVG, liquidity
A vocabulary built on where large orders are assumed to sit. The terms are specific; the assumption behind all of them is the thing to understand.
2.8
Gold (XAU/USD): how it differs from currencies
Different contract size, different pip, wider ranges. The arithmetic of risk per trade changes with all three.
2.9
Crypto CFDs: bitcoin without a wallet
You trade the price, not the coin: no wallet, no transfer, but weekend hours, wider spreads and funding costs of their own.
2.10
Index and share CFDs
An index CFD moves with a basket, a share CFD with one company. Both carry hours, dividends and corporate events a currency pair does not.
2.11
Scalping: why costs decide the outcome
At a few pips per trade, the spread and commission are most of the result. The lesson is the arithmetic, before the technique.
2.12
Day trading
Positions opened and closed inside one session: no swap, but every decision made while the market is moving.
2.13
Swing and position trading
Holding for days or weeks moves the cost from spread to swap and the risk from one session to overnight gaps.
2.14
Sessions, news and the calendar
Which hours a pair actually moves in, and which scheduled releases widen spreads enough to matter to a stop.
2.15
A plan, a journal and a backtest
Three written artefacts: what you will do, what you did, and what the rule would have done before you used it.

03 · Level 3Position size, drawdown, margin calls, and the habits that empty an account faster than any bad entry. Twelve lessons.

Risk and the mind: how accounts survive

3.1
Risk per trade: the 1-2% rule
Deciding the money you can lose on one trade before deciding anything else. Everything downstream — size, stop, target — follows from that number.
3.2
Working out position size
Risk in money, divided by the stop distance in pips, divided by pip value. Three numbers you already have, in that order.
3.3
Risk and reward
What the ratio between stop and target does to the hit rate you need. The arithmetic is fixed; the ratio you can actually get is not.
3.4
Drawdown and losing streaks
How far an account falls from its peak, and why a run of losses is normal rather than evidence that something broke.
3.5
Margin call and stop out
The two thresholds at which a broker warns you and then closes your positions, and the numbers that bring an account to them.
3.6
Fear, greed and FOMO
The three states in which traders break their own rules, and what each one feels like from the inside while it happens.
3.7
Overtrading and chasing losses
Two patterns that turn one bad trade into a bad week: trading more often than the plan allows, and raising size to win it back.
3.8
Discipline: the rules you do not break
A short written routine before, during and after the session — the part of trading that is the same every day.
3.9
Signals, robots and copy trading
Three ways to hand decisions to someone else, what each one actually copies, and what stays your risk regardless.
3.10
Checking a broker in the local register
Where the register is, what to type into it, and which answers mean the licence does not cover what you were offered.
3.11
Tax on trading in your country
Which authority wants to hear about trading results, what kind of income they are treated as, and what records to keep from the start.
3.12
Taking your money out
The route a withdrawal takes, how long each step holds it, and the checks that stop one.

Routes by goalFour fixed sets of lessons from the three levels, each in the order that answers one question.

What do I need right now?

Route 1
From zero in two weeks
The fourteen lessons that get you from never having opened a chart to placing a sized trade on a demo account.
Route 2
Understand leverage without emptying an account
Seven lessons on what leverage actually borrows, what margin is held against it, and what a stop out looks like.
Route 3
Stop losing money to spreads and swaps
Six lessons on the three costs of a trade and how account type and holding period change them.
Route 4
Trade gold
Six lessons on XAU/USD: contract size, how a pip is counted, and why risk per trade has to be worked out differently.