Markets, explained without the hype. Independent coverage of crypto, currencies and global markets.
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Plain-language education on risk management, position sizing, trading psychology and the mechanics of leveraged and short-duration products — including a frank look at why most retail traders lose money.
8 articles
Educational content only. Nothing in this section is a recommendation to trade any product, and several instruments discussed here — including leveraged CFDs and binary options — lose money for the large majority of retail investors. Read the full risk disclaimer.
Regulators require brokers to publish how many retail accounts lose money. The figure sits between 70% and 80%, year after year. Here is what drives it, and what it means for you.
Binary options are all-or-nothing bets on short-term price moves. The UK banned their sale to retail investors and the EU restricted them. Here is the mechanism, the maths, and the reasoning.
Risk management improves outcomes when a strategy has an edge. On products with a built-in negative expected return, it only changes how long the account takes to deplete. Here is the arithmetic.
Risk management is not a stop-loss. It is a set of limits decided before you have a position, covering per-trade risk, correlation, drawdown and the point at which you stop trading entirely.
Candlesticks compress four prices into one shape and are genuinely useful for reading a market. The pattern-recognition industry built on top of them is far less well supported.
Trading psychology is usually taught as discipline and mindset. The research points somewhere more useful — specific, measurable biases with specific structural countermeasures.
Not all beginner mistakes are equal. A few cause the majority of losses, and they are rarely the ones covered in introductory guides. Here they are, ordered by how much they cost.
A demo account tests whether you can operate a platform and follow a process. It cannot test how you behave when the money is real, which is where most trading errors originate.
