The school · where to start

How to learn trading as a beginner

The best way to learn trading as a beginner is in order, with practice at every step and no money at risk until the basics are automatic. Start with what a single candle records and what a market, an order and the spread actually are. Then learn where price reacts and how to tell whether a trend is still a trend, why the time of day changes what a move means, and how to size a position from the stop rather than from hope. Only then add named patterns and indicators — they are easier to judge once you can read the price underneath them. Keep a record of every idea, including the ones that fail, because a record is the only honest measure of progress. The AI Trade Ideas school is built in exactly this order, in eight parts, with an AI tutor marking your answers.

How long does it take to learn to trade?

Learning to read a chart takes weeks of steady practice; judging your own results honestly takes far longer, because it takes a large number of recorded trades before any result says more than luck. That is why the school measures what you learn — lessons, quizzes, practice charts, recorded trades — rather than what you earn.

Can you learn trading for free?

Yes, the first steps. A free AI Trade Ideas account includes the first modules with the tutor, the glossary, the reading guides, the video lessons and a Chart Practice sample. The full syllabus comes with a plan.

Do you need to trade real money to learn?

No. Reading, marking charts and writing down what you would do — and where you would be wrong — builds the skill without risk. Recording paper trades the same way as real ones teaches the habit that matters most.

Module · free

What a candle is saying

Open, high, low, close — and why touching a price is not closing beyond it The module

Candle: One fixed slice of time drawn as four numbers: the first price, the highest, the lowest and the last. Also called a bar. Change the slice and the bar changes; the market does not.
OHLC: Open, high, low, close — the four prices every candle records. Every other feature of a bar, from its colour to its wicks, is calculated from these four.
Timeframe: The length of time one candle covers — five minutes, one hour, one day. Any statement about closes, levels or trends is incomplete until it names the timeframe.
Body: The filled block between the open and the close. It measures net progress: where price started against where it actually finished.
Wick: The thin line out to the high or the low. Prices that were genuinely traded inside the period and then left behind before it ended. Also called a shadow or tail.
Range: The high minus the low of a bar: the total distance travelled, wicks included. Range is the journey; the body is the destination.
Body as a share of range: How much of the distance a bar covered it actually kept. A high share means it moved and held the move; a low share means it moved and gave it back.
ATR: Average True Range: the average size of the last n bars, commonly fourteen, including any gap from the previous close. The yardstick that turns "a big bar" into a checkable number.
Rejection: Shorthand for a long wick: the market traded at those prices during the period and did not stay there by the close. It records what happened, not who did it or why.
Liquidity: How many orders are resting near the current price, ready to trade. Thin liquidity means a modest order can move price a long way — which is how long wicks get printed.
Spread: The gap between the bid (the price to sell at) and the ask (the price to buy at). It widens in thin conditions, and a wide spread can print extremes few people traded at.
Stop order: An instruction to buy or sell automatically once a set price trades. Clusters of them tend to sit just beyond obvious prices, and triggering them can print a sharp wick.
Close: The last traded price of the period. The one number that has to survive the whole period to exist, and the only one that cannot be taken back once the bar ends.
Close versus touch: Trading above a price and finishing above it are two different events. Everything in the product that says "broke" or "held" means the second one, on a named timeframe.
Unfinished bar: A candle whose period has not ended. Its apparent body runs from the open to the last traded price, which is still moving — so it has no close yet.

Module · free

Before the first trade

What is traded, why there are two prices, and what an order actually buys The module

Market: A place where orders to buy and orders to sell are matched. The price on the screen is the level of the most recent match — an agreement, not a valuation.
Instrument: One specific tradable thing with its own price and symbol — XAUUSD, EURUSD, a stock index. Every chart, level and analysis in the product is about exactly one.
Asset class: A family of instruments that behave and are priced in similar ways: currencies, metals, stock indices, commodities, crypto. Useful for grouping; it says nothing about direction.
Underlying: The thing whose price a contract follows — the gold, the index, the currency. Many retail accounts trade a contract on the underlying without ever owning it.
CFD: Contract for difference: a contract that pays the change in an underlying's price between opening and closing, with nothing physically changing hands. Not offered to retail clients in every country.
Pair: One thing priced in terms of another — EURUSD is euros in dollars, XAUUSD is gold in dollars. A move in the pair can come from either side of it, and the candle does not say which.
Mid price: The point halfway between the bid and the ask. A reference, not a price anyone can trade at on the spot: buys meet the ask and sells meet the bid.
Crossing the spread: Buying at the ask and selling at the bid. Every order that trades immediately does it, so a position opened and closed with no movement at all still loses the spread.
Bid chart: A chart whose candles are built from bid prices — the usual retail default. The ask sits a spread above every bar and is not drawn, so a buy order can be a spread away from what the chart shows.
Market order: An instruction to trade now at the best available price. The fill is guaranteed while the market is open; the exact price is not.
Limit order: An instruction to trade only at a set price or better. The price is guaranteed if it fills; the fill itself is not.
Fill: The record of an order being matched: the actual price, size and time. The only proof a position exists — a chart touching the order's price is not one.
Partial fill: Part of an order's size matched and the rest still waiting, because there was not enough on the other side at that price. Most common with limit orders and in thin markets.

Module

Your first position

Long or short, on borrowed exposure, with the exit written down first The module

Position: An open exposure to price, from the fill that opens it to the fill that closes it. It has a direction, a size and — if it was planned — a stop.
Long: Bought first, to be sold later. A long position gains when price rises and loses when it falls; its stop sits below the entry.
Short: Sold first, to be bought back later. A short gains when price falls and loses when it rises; its stop sits above the entry and is triggered on the ask.
Flat: Holding no position. The only state in which price movement costs nothing — and a perfectly good answer when no reading is clear.
Exposure: The full value a position controls: size × price. Ten ounces of gold at 2,400 is 24,000 of exposure, whatever the margin held against it.
Margin level: Equity divided by the margin in use, as a percentage. The number a broker watches to decide when to warn and when to close positions.
Margin call: A warning that the margin level has fallen to a threshold the broker sets: the deposit behind the open positions is running thin.
Stop-out: The broker closing positions automatically, at the market, once the margin level falls to a set threshold. An exit that protects the broker's loan — not a stop anyone planned.
Overnight financing: The charge, or occasionally credit, applied to a leveraged position held past the daily rollover. Also called swap. Small per night, paid every night.
Exit before entry: The rule that the stop — the price at which the idea is refuted — is written down before the position is opened, while nothing is at stake and the answer can still be honest.
Moving the stop away: Widening a stop after entry while the position is losing. The size was fitted to the old distance, so the trade now risks more than one R without anyone deciding to.
Break-even win rate: The share of trades that must reach the target just to break even at a given risk:reward: 1 ÷ (1 + reward/risk). At 1:2 it is one in three, before costs.

Module

Where price reacts

A level is where the market already did something — not a line that looks important The module

Level: A price where the market has already visibly reacted. A claim about finished bars, which is what makes it something that can be checked rather than defended.
Support: A level below the current price where falling price has previously stalled or turned up. A description of past behaviour, not a floor.
Resistance: A level above the current price where rising price has previously stalled or turned down. A description of past behaviour, not a ceiling.
Band: A level drawn with width. What the market reacts to is an area a few points deep, because the orders behind a reaction were never at one identical price.
Test: One arrival of price at a level, judged from the finished bars. The unit everything about levels is counted in.
Reaction: What the bars did on arrival: stalled, rejected, turned or departed sharply. How far and how fast price left is the observable part; motive is not.
Held versus respected: Held means the level can still be drawn afterwards. Respected means price left it quickly and by a distance. A level can hold and be ignored in the same arrival.
Round number: A price ending in zeros, such as 2300. Orders sometimes cluster there, but a round number only becomes a level if the bars actually reacted at it.
Stop run: Price pushing briefly beyond an obvious level, triggering the stop orders resting there, and closing back on the original side. A touch, not a break. Also called a stop hunt.
Retest: Price returning to a level it has already closed through, from the other side. A new test, judged by the same evidence as the first.
Role reversal: Former support behaving as resistance after a break, or the reverse. Common enough to watch for, not reliable enough to assume.
Fade: Treating an arrival at a level as a turn — taking the opposite side of the move that brought price there.
Breakout: Treating an arrival at a level as a continuation — price closing through the band and carrying on in the same direction.

Module

Market structure

Where a trend stops being one The module

Market structure: The pattern formed by successive swing highs and swing lows on a stated timeframe: rising in an uptrend, falling in a downtrend, flat in a trading range.
Swing point: A swing high is a peak with lower highs either side of it; a swing low is a trough with higher lows either side. How big a peak counts is a judgement, and the timeframe makes it.
Pullback: The counter-move between two pushes in a trend. In an uptrend, where a pullback stops is what creates the next higher low.
Higher high: A swing high above the previous swing high. Evidence that an uptrend has been occurring — backward-looking, and not where the definition can fail.
Higher low: A swing low above the previous swing low. The half of an uptrend that gives a specific price at which the sequence can be refuted.
Lower low: A swing low below the previous swing low. Together with lower highs, it defines a downtrend.
Sequence: Higher highs with higher lows, or lower lows with lower highs. A trend defined as something that can stop, rather than as a slope that can only be described afterwards.
Last higher low: The most recent pullback low in an uptrend. The single price at which a close beyond it makes the sequence stop being a true description of the chart.
Lower high: A push that stops short of the previous peak. Real information that buying has faded, and not by itself the end of an uptrend.
Break of structure: A close through the last higher low in an uptrend, or the last lower high in a downtrend. The moment the sequence stops being true. Often shortened to BOS.
Trading range: Sideways movement between a range high and a range low, with no sequence of higher or lower swings. Its edges are levels, judged by reactions like any other.
No sequence: Highs and lows at roughly the same prices. Neither trend definition applies, so neither "intact" nor "ended" is an available description.
Timeframe shopping: Switching to a different timeframe after the stated one stops agreeing with a view. The quickest way to turn a definition back into an opinion.

Module

The trading day

Why the clock is the most underrated indicator on any chart The module

Session: A block of the trading day named after the financial centre that dominates it — Tokyo, London, New York. Not a property of the instrument, but a fact about who is awake and trading.
Tokyo session: Also called the Asian session: 00:00–07:00 UTC in this product. Usually the quietest block of the day, producing tight ranges and the overnight highs and lows that London reacts to.
London session: 07:00–13:00 UTC in this product. The world's largest FX and metals centre opens and reprices overnight positions, so the day's first real expansion usually happens here.
London open: The first hour of the London session. Liquidity arrives in a rush, the overnight range is tested, and hourly bars often become several times larger than the ones before.
Overlap: The three hours, 13:00–16:00 UTC, when London and New York are both open. Counted as its own block rather than as part of either, because it behaves like neither — deeper, faster and more prone to sharp reversals.
New York session: 16:00–21:00 UTC in this product, after London has closed. Driven by US flow and the US equity session, with liquidity thinning steadily towards the close.
Maintenance break: The daily pause in the futures markets, 21:00–22:00 UTC here. The thinnest hour of the day, excluded from every session so it cannot distort their averages.
UTC: Coordinated Universal Time, the world's reference clock. It never shifts for daylight saving, which is why session boundaries and the statistics built on them are fixed in it.
Volatility: How far and how fast price moves over a given window. It follows the clock: low in the Asian session, rising at the London open, peaking in the overlap.
Whipsaw: A sharp move in one direction followed quickly by a sharp move back, often catching traders on both sides. Most common when liquidity is changing fast — the overlap, the opens, releases.
Opening hour: The first hour of a session. It hands over a high, a low and a direction that the rest of the session either keeps or does not.
Opening read: The direction a session's first hour points in, together with the high and low it leaves behind. The study counts how often the session is still on that side at its close.
Thin book: A market with few participants willing to trade size. The same order moves price further, so a move made in a thin book says less than the identical move made in a busy one.
90-day baseline: What a session normally does, measured over about a quarter. The number beside every weekly figure, and the only thing that makes a single week readable.

Module

Risk before entry

The stop sets the size. Never the other way round. The module

Stop distance: The gap between the entry price and the stop, measured in the instrument's own unit — points, ticks or pips. Read off the chart before anything about money is decided.
R: The money lost if the stop is reached: one trade's worth of being wrong. Every other number in the trade — target, result, slippage — is quoted as a multiple of it.
R-multiple: A result expressed in R: +2R made twice what was risked, −1R lost exactly the planned amount. It makes trades in different instruments and account sizes directly comparable.
Risk budget: The fixed amount of money one trade is allowed to cost, chosen in advance. It does not grow because a setup looks better than usual, and it does not shrink because the stop is wider.
Risk per trade: The risk budget expressed as a percentage of the account — for example 0.5% or 1%. On a 10,000 account, 1% risk per trade means one R is 100.
Position size: The number of units, lots or contracts in a trade: risk budget ÷ (stop distance × point value). An output of two decisions already made, never a starting point.
Invalidation: The price at which the reason for a trade stops being true — usually a piece of structure breaking. The stop sits just beyond it.
Point value: What a one-point move is worth for one lot or contract of an instrument. It is the bridge between a stop distance on the chart and a loss in money.
Pip: The standard unit of price movement in currency pairs — usually the fourth decimal place (0.0001), or the second (0.01) for yen pairs. Indices and metals are more often measured in points or ticks.
Lot: A standardised trade size. In currency pairs a standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency, a mini lot 10,000 and a micro lot 1,000; other instruments define a lot in their own contract terms.
Risk-reward ratio: The distance to the stop compared with the distance to the target, written 1:2 or "2R". A measurement of two distances — it says nothing about how often either is reached.
Drawdown: How far an account has fallen from its highest point, usually as a percentage. Recovery is asymmetric: a 20% drawdown needs a 25% gain to repair, a 50% drawdown needs 100%.
Leverage: Borrowed exposure: control of a position larger than the cash put up for it, such as 1:30. It lowers the margin required; it does not change what the stop costs.
Margin: The deposit a broker holds while a leveraged position is open. It is collateral, not the amount at risk — the loss at the stop is set by distance, point value and size.
Beyond, not on: A stop placed outside a level's own noise rather than inside it, so that reaching it means the idea was refuted — not that price merely brushed the level it was built on.
The controllable input: Position size. The market sets the fill, whether the stop is reached and how far a move runs; the number of units is the one part of a trade nobody else has a vote in.

Module

Reading an outcome

A flattering record is worse than no record at all The module

Outcome: What actually happened to a position, written down once it is closed. Every closed position is one, including the scratches and the ones closed early.
The missing rows: Trades that were taken and never recorded. They are not a random sample — they lean toward losses and toward the trades nobody is proud of.
Win rate: The share of recorded trades that closed in profit. On its own it says nothing about whether an approach makes money — it has to be read beside the average win and loss in R.
Sample size: How many trades a figure rests on. At twenty, an approach that truly wins half the time routinely shows anything from six to fourteen winners, so twenty says almost nothing about an edge.
Expectancy: The average result per trade, measured in R: win rate times average win, minus loss rate times average loss. Together with the win rate it tells the whole story; either one alone is close to meaningless.
Process versus outcome: Two separate judgements about one trade: whether the decision would be made again knowing only what was known at the time, and what it happened to pay. A good decision loses regularly.
Trade journal: The written record of every trade taken: the plan, the numbers and the outcome. Its value depends entirely on completeness — a journal missing its losses describes a trader who does not exist.
Selection bias: A distortion caused by which data made it into a set rather than by the data itself. In a trade journal, the unrecorded trades lean toward losses, so the recorded win rate is inflated.
Outcome bias: Judging the quality of a decision by its result. It rewards lucky bad trades, punishes sound ones that lost, and slowly replaces a tested process with a superstitious one.
Scratch: A trade closed at or near breakeven, often by hand and early. It is still an outcome and belongs in the record — scratches are among the rows most often left out.
Variance: The natural scatter of results around their true average. Over small samples it is large enough to make a sound approach look broken and a weak one look brilliant.
Edge: A genuine, repeatable advantage — a positive expectancy that holds up over a large sample. It cannot be seen in a handful of trades, only in a complete record of many.

More: the full glossary, the chart reading guides, Otus, the AI tutor and the teaching standards.

Education only. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and nothing predicts where price will go.

Start with lesson one.

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