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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

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  6. 2.6

    Price action: trading without indicators

    Reading the chart from structure — highs, lows, ranges and breaks — instead of from a calculated line.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  12. 2.12

    Day trading

    Positions opened and closed inside one session: no swap, but every decision made while the market is moving.

  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.

  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.

  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.

Start at the first lesson if this is new. If you already have an account, Level 3 is the one that keeps it.Wanjiruyour course guide