Trading for Beginners - Intermediate Level

Here's our Risk Disclosure statement and our Disclaimer.  Please take the time to view them and read them.  They really are important.

The marketplace can be a mysterious place.  In this lesson, we take the mystery out of the market and give you the tools to understand what the basis of every market transaction really is.

Well, just who are the market participants that you'll be seeing every time you engage with the markets?  Believe it or not, we can break market activity in to several groups.  In this lesson, we develop an understanding of who's in the market, why they're there, and we go in to some depth on the different types of speculators

What type of participant will you be?

Ever wonder where all this trading takes place?  In this lesson we break that question down for foreign exchange markets, futures markets, and the US stock markets.

This is  quick lesson attempting to re-emphasize one the most important point in why a trade actually happens.

Long or Short?  What exactly do we mean by each?  This lesson breaks down the lingo so you can easily understand it.

We've learned the basics of the marketplace, now let's get you speaking the language of the markets.  We cover the fundamentals in this lesson on the Bid price, the Ask price, and the Spread.  Phil and Bill are back for another instructional lesson and we get to look at a live market trading window.

We start to dig in to orders beginning here with one of the two most basic of orders - the Market Order.  While a basic order type, it underpins nearly all other advanced order types, so understanding its importance, its mechanics, and its risks is vitally important to establishing a sound foundation in the fundamentals.

Next up is the most basic of orders - the Limit Order.  Between Limit Orders and Market Orders, nearly all others are some combination or repackaging of these two.  Without a solid grasp of Limit Orders, you'll struggle in later lessons.  Enjoy!

Stop orders takes the concepts of Market and Limit orders to the next level.  Actually, Stop Orders aren't really orders at all.  This lesson unpacks why that is and why you want to use them.

With Brackets, you'll start to see how we can use each of the concepts learned before - a little like building blocks to construct a more full approach to entry and exit of the market.

With so many different participants swinging different size in the market, how does the exchange keep track of it all?  This lesson dives deep in to the How and Why of price discovery mechanisms.

Our last lesson in this section, we conclude with several examples for you to follow along with to help solidify your understanding of price discovery and how different exchanges use different methods.

We covered a lot of ground in this section, let's take minute or two to sum it up before moving on to the quiz.

With trading, there are risks with everything.  This lesson begins to develop your understanding of many of the different types of risks you may want to consider in your analysis.

This lesson begins to focus in on how to employ risk in your trading calculations and their potential outcomes.  The conclusions drawn from this lecture will hopefully stay with you for a long time.

Have you wondered why some disclosure statements say you can lose more than you put in to the market?  This lesson shows you several examples (but by no means all examples) of just how this can happen.  We explore the world of Kurtosis - don't worry we don't derive the formula - do drive the discussion.

This lesson builds on the concept of Kurtosis and how several of the large market moving events of the past 30 years demonstrate that market returns and normal distributions are poor approximations of each other.

Timeframes are one of the fundamental building blocks of chart development.  In this lesson we should you just how raw market data looks coming to our terminal before using it to build differing periodicities.

Charts are a terrific way to visualize the market.  In this lesson, we go in to how to construct charts, why they're used, and give plenty of examples for you to get started!

We begin our market analysis segment with Fundamental Analysis.  Fundamental Analysis is a tried and true way to search for under-valued or over-valued securities and can be used to form trading hypothesis derived from your analysis.  It can be time consuming and is generally industry-specific, but that shouldn't dissuade you from using it.  This lesson gives a great overview of what Fundamental Analysis is and why you might use it in your trading.

Technical Analysis is the second large segment of Market Analysis that we'll cover.  This lesson gives an overview what Technical Analysis is and what assumptions underpin its use.  Technical Analysis is a very broad topic that we'll cover further in later Sections of the course.

News reports can be funny.  Sometimes they're planned, sometimes they're unplanned.  Not all of them need to be taken in to your trading analysis, but some do.  How do you discern what you need from what you don't need?

This lesson explores government statistics like Gross Domestic Product, Inflation, Jobs data, and though not part of the government, the Federal Reserve Federal Funds Rate.  This may be pretty dry stuff, but it should help you paint a picture of the broader economic landscape.

Entire courses can be dedicated to the study of Technical Analysis - and we'll be developing one for you very soon.  In this course for beginners, we'll be able to give you the basics of Technical Analysis starting with the fundamentals and moving our way to several examples of indicators.

Keep an eye out for our full Udemy Course on Technical Analysis!

Consolidation and Distribution are opposing market forces that form the fundamentals of market action.  In this lesson, we dig in to what these look like in live markets along with an example from our buddy Bill.

Price Action analysis is one side of the Technical Analysis coin.  The other side being indicators.  In this lesson we begin to develop our understanding of the Price Action and how it can be used to in the markets.  Caution:  subjectivity ahead.

Indicators are a double-edged sword.  They can be extremely helpful, but also can give false hope of seeing in to the market's action.  In this lesson, we break down what indicators really are, show examples of the more popular indicator classifications, and give you some pointers on how to get started with them.

Along with consolidation and distribution, trend is one of the fundamental building blocks of the market and in this lesson we develop your understanding of exactly what we mean by trend.

Building on what we learned about in the previous lesson, here we teach you a tried and true method for properly drawing trendlines and the minor extension of that - channels.  These are two tools you'll find yourself using very often.

Believe it or not, Chop and Trading Ranges are two entirely different things.  This lesson explains why.

Flags and Pennants.  Two very common Price Action patterns but with some key differences.  This lesson unpacks what those differences are.  We've included a few exercises for you to try as well.

Multi-tops are classic Price Action patterns and this lesson introduces them to you.

Finally, this is probably what you've been waiting for this entire course.  How do you construct a trade?  In this lesson, we give you our 4-step process to document your intentions before getting in to a trade.

This example using live market-replay data, develops further the idea of selling weakness and shows a trade selling a lower low.

Our next example of trading took some patience to get it right.  Here, we analyze a recent move in the gold market and trade accordingly.

In this example from the crude oil market, we look to trade in to a developing trend channel but need to alter our original work some as the market tightens.  It's a good example of how the market challenges you on a regular basis.