Getting started

One only, and the same one for several months. This is the most useful recommendation in this module and the most systematically ignored. Every market has a personality — a usual range, hours when it moves and hours when it sleeps, typical reactions to news. That personality is only learned by watching the same chart, and switching markets every week means starting from scratch each time.

Major currency pairs, euro-dollar first among them, are the default choice for learning. They trade continuously from Sunday evening to Friday evening, costs are among the lowest, and position size can be scaled down very finely — which matters enormously when your capital is small and the 1% rule forces tiny sizes.

Stock indices are the other reasonable choice. Moves are cleaner and the hours more structured, which helps you understand what a session is. On the other hand the daily range is larger: a badly computed position size is punished faster.

Cryptocurrencies are attractive because they never close and the entry ticket is low. That is precisely what makes them poor learning ground: a market open on Sunday evening encourages trading out of boredom, the range is markedly wider, and costs vary a lot from one platform to another. Shares pose a different problem for a beginner: their price reacts to company-specific information you have no way to anticipate.

One last point, often neglected: look at what time your market actually moves, and compare with the hours you have. A market whose active period falls during your working day does not suit you, whatever its other qualities.

Far less than what people try to sell you. Three things are enough, and two of them are free.

A charting platform first. TradingView is the de facto standard: it runs in the browser, has a free tier that is more than enough to learn on, and lets you annotate charts — drawing levels, marking zones, saving your analyses. It is the tool you will spend the most hours on, so the only one a subscription may eventually be worth, once the free version genuinely limits you.

A demo account next, opened with a broker. It gives you fictional money and real prices, which is exactly what you need to learn to place orders without risk. Open one now: the mechanics — placing an order, setting a stop, computing a size — take a few hours to learn, and it would be absurd to pay to discover that.

A notebook, finally. Paper or a file, it does not matter. It is the least impressive tool and the most decisive, and the next step is entirely about it.

What you do not need: a paid indicator, a signals room, a six-screen setup, and above all not real money. None of those makes up for the absence of a method, and the last one turns a learning mistake into a straight loss. One remark on signal rooms while we are here: following an order you do not understand teaches you nothing, even when it wins — you will know neither why it worked, nor what to do the time it does not.

This is the tool that most clearly separates people who progress from people going in circles, and almost nobody keeps one. The reason is simple: it has no visible effect on the first few trades, and its value only appears after several dozen entries, when a regularity you never suspected finally becomes obvious.

Before each trade, write four things: why you are entering, where your stop is, where your target is, and what would make you admit you were wrong. Those four lines take a minute and have an immediate effect: half the trades you were about to take do not survive having to be justified in writing. That is the first benefit of a journal, and it arrives before all the others.

After the trade, record what actually happened, and above all what you did against what you had planned. Did you respect your stop? Did you exit before the target? Did you add to a losing position? A screenshot of the chart at the moment of entry is worth long descriptions.

Add one line everybody forgets: your state when you entered. Tired, rushed, chasing a loss back, or simply filling an evening with nothing else to do. It is in that column, not in the analysis, that the most expensive and most easily corrected patterns are found.

Review everything once a week, across all the trades rather than the last one. The question to ask is never “was this trade good”, but “what keeps coming back”. A journal is read by repeated patterns: the same kind of entry that always fails, the same hour of the day that costs money, the same emotion before the worst decisions. A single trade teaches nothing, thirty trades read together teach almost everything.

It is almost never the analysis. The mistakes that empty accounts are behavioural, there are few of them, and they show up in everybody in the same order. Knowing them in advance is not enough to avoid them, but it lets you recognise them while they are happening — which is already a great deal.

The first is re-entering immediately after a loss, to win it back. That next trade has nothing to do with the market any more: its size is bigger, its analysis weaker, and it arrives at the worst moment, the one where you are least clear-headed. It is by far the fastest way to turn a bad day into a bad month.

The second is widening a stop that is about to be hit. Module 3 covered it, but it deserves repeating here because it is rarely experienced as a mistake at the time: it always presents itself as a considered decision, backed by a new argument found in thirty seconds.

The third is trading too often. Sitting in front of a screen creates the feeling that you must act, when most of the time a market offers nothing worth taking. Every unnecessary trade pays costs, consumes attention and raises the odds of a decision made out of boredom. Doing nothing is a position in its own right, and it is the most frequent one among people who last.

The fourth is changing method every two weeks. After a run of losses — which happens to everybody, including with a sound approach — the temptation is to go looking for something else. By switching, you lose the only thing that allowed a judgement: a track record long enough to tell a bad system from a bad run. Nothing can be concluded from ten trades, and it is precisely after ten trades that most people conclude.

The fifth, finally, is going to real money too early. A demo account does not reproduce the pressure, that much is true — but going live before mastering the mechanics does not teach you to handle pressure, it only teaches you to lose money while enduring it.

Week 1: do not trade. Open TradingView, display one single market — euro-dollar or a major index — on the 1-hour timeframe, and watch it half an hour a day. Learn to recognise a bullish candle, a bearish one, a long wick. Draw two or three horizontal lines where price actually reacted, and watch what it does when it comes back to them. Nothing else.

Week 2: open a demo account and place orders at random, deliberately. The goal is not to win, it is to master the mechanics: placing a market order, resting a limit order, attaching a stop, computing a position size from that stop, closing out. Do it until it is boring — that is the sign it is learned.

Weeks 3 and 4: start keeping the journal. Before each demo trade, write your four lines; afterwards, write what happened. Set yourself a low limit and hold to it: two or three trades a day at most. At the end of the fourth week, read the whole thing in one sitting and look for what keeps coming back.

Only then look for a reading method. You will have the foundations needed to judge whether what you are offered holds up — which you could not do a month ago, and which is exactly why you should have bought nothing that week.

What comes next is learning to read the sequence of candles: why price goes hunting for certain levels, what it leaves behind when it moves fast, and at which times of day those moves are most reliable. That is what ICT concepts cover, and it is what I teach. This site’s glossary explains them one by one, with a diagram for each — start with market structure, which underpins all the others, then liquidity, which explains the “why” behind the moves.