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
- Level 1
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.
- Level 2
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.
- Level 3
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.
- Level 4
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.
- Level 5
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.
- Level 6
2.6 Price action: trading without indicators
Reading the chart from structure — highs, lows, ranges and breaks — instead of from a calculated line.
- Level 7
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.
- Level 8
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.
- Level 9
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.
- Level 10
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.
- Level 11
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.
- Level 12
2.12 Day trading
Positions opened and closed inside one session: no swap, but every decision made while the market is moving.
- Level 13
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.
- Level 14
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.
- Level 15
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.