The language of the charts, in plain English
+31 more guides
Two honest sentences per term, and 39 full guides — enough to actually understand it, short enough to remember. New terms are added continuously as the curriculum grows.
Divergence
Divergence is a disagreement between two pivots on price and the two matching pivots on an indicator — price makes the higher high, the indicator does not. There are four types, two of which read as continuation rather than weakness, and with a 5-bar pivot setting every one of them is already 11 bars old the first moment it exists.
Related: Lesson 19 — RSI & momentum
Candlestick
A candlestick shows four prices for one period — open, close, high and low — as a body with wicks. The body shows who won that period (buyers or sellers); the wicks show how far the losing side managed to push before being rejected.
Related: Lesson 10 — Candlesticks
Support and resistance
Support is a price area where buying has repeatedly stopped declines; resistance is where selling has repeatedly stopped rallies. They are zones, not exact lines — and the more times a level is tested, the more attention it attracts, for both bounces and breaks.
Related: Lesson 12 — Support and resistance
Leverage
Leverage lets you control a position larger than your capital by borrowing from the exchange — 10x leverage means a 1% move changes your equity by roughly 10%. It amplifies losses exactly as fast as gains, and past a threshold the exchange forcibly closes (liquidates) your position.
Related: Lesson 8 — Leverage and margin
Position sizing
Position sizing is calculating how much to buy or sell so that if your stop-loss is hit, you lose only a fixed small percentage of your account — commonly 1–2%. It is the single practice that most separates traders who survive from traders who don't.
Related: Lesson 42 — Position sizing · Position size calculator
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA)
DCA is splitting a sum into buys of the same dollar size, planned before the first one — so a lower price automatically buys more units. Four $250 buys at 100/80/60/90 give an average cost of 79.56 against a plain price average of 82.50. It lowers the average cost and the percentage loss; it does not lower the money at risk.
Related: Lesson 44 — scaling in and out · position sizing
Stop-loss
A stop-loss is a pre-placed order that closes your position automatically at the price where your trade idea is proven wrong. Placed correctly, it converts an unlimited risk into a known, chosen cost of doing business.
Related: Lesson 43 — Stop losses
Risk/reward ratio
Risk/reward compares what you stand to lose at your stop against what you aim to gain at your target — risking $100 to make $300 is 1:3. With a good ratio you can be wrong more often than right and still be profitable, which is why it matters more than win rate.
Related: Lesson 41 — Risk-to-reward
Liquidity
Liquidity is how much can be bought or sold at a given price without moving it. High liquidity means tight spreads and clean fills; low liquidity means slippage — and clusters of stop-losses form "liquidity pools" that larger players are drawn to.
Related: Lesson 9 — Liquidity and spread
Market maker
A market maker continuously quotes both buy and sell prices, earning the spread while providing the liquidity everyone else trades against. They are not out to hunt you personally — but their inventory management explains many of the sharp wicks that touch obvious stop levels.
Related: Lesson 5 — How the crypto market actually works
Drawdown
Drawdown is the decline from your account's peak to its lowest point after — a 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain just to break even. Managing drawdown is why professionals risk small: the math of recovery is brutally asymmetric.
Related: Lesson 52 — Avoiding the big loss
FOMO
Fear of missing out is the urge to enter a move that has already happened because everyone seems to be profiting from it. It reliably produces the worst entries on the chart — late, unplanned and oversized — which is why it gets its own lesson.
Related: Lesson 45 — FOMO
Revenge trading
Revenge trading is placing a trade to win back a loss that has just happened, rather than because a setup appeared. It shows up in the size field before it shows up on the chart — and on a $10,000 account, one 10× oversized override turns half a winning trade into almost six.
Related: Lesson 46 — Revenge trading · FOMO
Order book
The order book is the live list of all outstanding buy orders (bids) and sell orders (asks) at each price level. Reading its depth tells you where liquidity actually sits — and how far your market order will move the price.
Related: Lesson 9 · liquidity
Bid-ask spread
The spread is the gap between the highest price buyers will pay and the lowest price sellers will accept. It is an invisible fee you pay on every round trip — tight on BTC, wide on small altcoins, and wider still in volatile moments exactly when you want out.
Related: Lesson 9 — Liquidity and spread
Slippage
Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price your order actually filled at, caused by thin liquidity or fast markets. Market orders in a crash can slip several percent — one reason stop-losses should be placed, not improvised.
Related: Lesson 7 — Order types
Funding rate
On perpetual futures, funding is a periodic payment between longs and shorts that keeps the contract price tied to spot. Persistently positive funding means longs are paying to stay in — a crowded-trade signal that often precedes violent unwinds.
Related: Deep dive: liquidation cascades
Open interest
Open interest (OI) is the total value of derivative positions currently open. Rising OI with rising price means new money is driving the move; OI spiking while price stalls means leverage is crowding in — fuel for a cascade.
Related: Deep dive: liquidation cascades
Liquidation
Liquidation is the exchange force-closing your leveraged position because losses have consumed your margin. Unlike a stop-loss, you don't choose the price — and clustered liquidations chain into the cascades behind crypto's fastest crashes.
Related: Lesson 8 · liquidation cascades
Breakout and retest
A breakout is price escaping a level that repeatedly held; a retest is its return to that level, which often flips role — old resistance acting as new support. Professionals often prefer entering on the retest because a failed one exposes the false breakout early.
Related: Stage 3 — Technical analysis
Timeframe
A timeframe is the duration each candle represents — from one minute to one month. Higher timeframes carry more signal and less noise; most beginners lose on low timeframes where fees, spread and randomness dominate any edge.
Related: Lesson 11 — Choosing your timeframe
Expectancy
Expectancy is your average profit or loss per trade over a large sample: (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss). A positive expectancy is the mathematical definition of an edge — and the only reason to place a trade.
Related: Risk/reward planner
Win rate
Win rate is the percentage of your trades that close in profit — and alone it means nothing: a 90% win rate loses money if the tenth trade gives it all back. It only gains meaning next to risk/reward, inside the expectancy formula.
Related: Lesson 41 · expectancy
Market order
A market order buys or sells immediately at the best prices resting in the order book. It guarantees that you are filled, not the price you get: you pay the taker fee, half the spread and any slippage — every triggered stop-loss becomes one.
Related: Lesson 7 — Order types · slippage
Crypto order types
Reduce Only, Post Only and Time in Force are controls a stock broker never showed you. Leave Reduce Only off when closing 0.15 BTC with 0.5 in the size box and you open a $21,000 short by accident — and a rejected Post Only order is not written to your order history at all.
Related: Lesson 7 — Order types · stop-limit order · maker & taker fees
Trailing stop
A trailing stop follows price in your favour and never moves back. The callback rate you type in is not a safety setting — it fixes a ceiling on your own exit: with a 5% callback on a move that peaks at $130,000, you cannot exit above $123,500, whatever the trend does.
Related: stop-loss · take-profit · Lesson 7 — Order types
Stop-limit order
A stop-limit order has two prices, not one: the stop price triggers it and the limit price caps the fill. That second price is a promise you may not be able to keep — if the market gaps past it, nothing fills and you still hold the position.
Related: Lesson 7 — Order types · stop-loss · limit order
Limit order
A limit order rests in the book at your chosen price or better and fills only if the market comes to it. You control the price and usually pay the lower maker fee; the cost is that the order may never fill and the move runs without you.
Related: Lesson 7 — Order types · order book
Take-profit
A take-profit is a pre-placed order that closes your position at a chosen target, fixing the risk/reward ratio before the trade exists. Where it goes — a structural level, not a round number — and whether you use a hard target, partial exits or a trailing stop changes what a winner is worth.
Related: risk/reward · Trade planner
Mark price
Mark price is the fair value a perpetual exchange uses for unrealised PnL and liquidation, built from a spot index across several venues rather than the last trade on one. A thin-book wick cannot liquidate you — but it can still trigger a stop set on last price.
Related: liquidation · Liquidation calculator
Perpetual futures
A perpetual is a futures contract with no expiry, kept near spot by a funding payment between longs and shorts. It allows long or short with leverage on a fraction of the position as margin — and liquidates you when losses consume that margin.
Related: Spot vs futures · funding rate
Volatility
Volatility is the size of price movement over a period, usually expressed as a percentage range per day or as an average true range (ATR). High volatility means wide swings in both directions; low volatility means small ones.
Related: position sizing · liquidation
Maker and taker fees
Exchanges charge two fee rates. A taker fee applies when your order fills immediately against orders already in the book (a market order, or a limit order priced to fill at once); a maker fee applies when your order rests in the book and is later filled by someone else.
Related: market order · limit order · market maker
Margin
Margin is the money you set aside as collateral to open and hold a leveraged position. Initial margin is the amount required to open it — position size divided by leverage.
Related: leverage · liquidation · isolated vs cross
Crypto wallet
A crypto wallet stores keys, not coins. The balance is an entry on the blockchain; the wallet holds the private key that can spend it, derives your receiving address from that key, and signs transactions. This is why a wallet needs no account, why nothing can be reset, and why deleting the app does not touch the balance.
Related: seed phrase · self-custody · withdrawing safely
Seed phrase
A seed phrase (also recovery phrase or mnemonic) is a list of 12 or 24 ordinary words that a wallet generates when it is created. Every private key and every address in that wallet is derived from those words, so the phrase can rebuild the whole wallet on any device.
Related: self-custody · security setup
Self-custody
Self-custody means holding the private keys to your crypto yourself, in a wallet you control, instead of leaving the coins in an exchange account where the exchange holds the keys. With self-custody no company can freeze, lose or lend out your coins — and no company can recover them if you lose your seed phrase or send them to the wrong place.
Related: seed phrase · withdrawing safely
Stablecoin
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a fixed value, almost always one US dollar. Fiat-backed stablecoins hold dollars and short-term government debt in reserve for every token issued; crypto-collateralised ones lock more than a dollar of crypto per token; algorithmic ones try to hold the peg with supply rules and no full reserve — the design that has failed most spectacularly.
Related: spread · self-custody
RSI (Relative Strength Index)
RSI compares the average size of a market’s up moves with the average size of its down moves over 14 bars and puts that ratio on a 0–100 scale. On a worked 15-close series, up moves totalling 4,030 against down moves totalling 930 give RS 4.33 and a reading of 81.25 — even though only 9 of the 14 bars closed up.
Related: Lesson 19 — RSI and momentum
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