Learn how the market actually works
Most trading education fails in one of two directions. It is either academic — elegant theory that describes a market nobody trades in — or it is a list of indicator settings with no explanation of why anyone would use them. Neither survives contact with a real position and real money.
These guides take the other route. Each one covers a single part of the job end to end, in plain language, with the mechanics behind it rather than the slogan on top of it: how to read what price and volume are telling you, how to turn that into rules you can repeat, how to size a position so one bad week cannot end your account, and how to keep following your own rules when it stops being comfortable. They are free, and they stand on their own.
Technical Analysis Explained
START HEREWhat a price chart is, what candlesticks and volume are actually recording, and how trend, support and resistance emerge from the behaviour of buyers and sellers rather than from drawing rules. Includes what technical analysis cannot do.
How to Build a Trading System
The six decisions every system has to answer in writing, how to think about win rate versus average win, what expectancy tells you that a win rate hides, and how to test rules on historical data without fooling yourself.
Chart Patterns That Actually Matter
Continuation and reversal patterns, the market mechanics that make each one form, and the volume and context checks that separate a pattern worth trading from the same shape appearing by chance.
Risk Management and Position Sizing
The arithmetic of survival: how to size a position from your stop rather than your conviction, why drawdowns are harder to climb out of than to fall into, and how long a losing streak a working system will still hand you.
How to Screen for Stocks Worth Trading
Turning thousands of tickers into a watchlist you can actually manage — liquidity and volatility filters, relative strength, and a weekly routine that produces candidates before they move instead of after.
Trading Psychology
Why a profitable set of rules still loses money in practice. FOMO, loss aversion, sunk cost, revenge trading, overconfidence after a streak and the hesitation that follows one — plus a pre-trade checklist and the structural fixes that work better than willpower.
Stock Trading Glossary
Sixty-six terms defined in one or two sentences each, without the circular definitions — from ATR, expectancy and slippage to loss aversion, anchoring and the rest of the behavioural vocabulary. Each section links to the guide that covers it properly.
Common questions
Do I need a finance degree to learn stock trading?
No. Trading is a craft built on a small number of repeatable decisions: what to buy, how much, where to get out, and when to stand aside. None of that requires academic finance. What it does require is a written set of rules and the discipline to follow them through a losing streak, which is where most of the difficulty actually lives.
Is technical analysis or fundamental analysis better?
They answer different questions. Fundamental analysis asks what a business is worth; technical analysis asks what buyers and sellers are doing to its share price right now. Traders holding positions for days or weeks lean on the second because it is the only one that speaks to timing, but neither replaces the other and neither predicts the future.
How much money do I need to start trading stocks?
Enough that a sensible position — one where a stop-loss costs you a small percentage of the account — is still large enough to be worth the commission. The bigger constraint is not the balance but the risk per trade. An account small enough that you feel every loss personally will push you into decisions your rules do not allow, which is the expensive failure, not the account size.
What is the most common reason beginners lose money?
Position sizes that are too large for the account. An oversized position turns an ordinary losing trade into a serious loss, and a serious loss makes the next decision emotional rather than mechanical. Almost every other beginner mistake — moving stops, holding losers, revenge trading — is downstream of that first one.
Can a trading system be backtested reliably?
It can be tested usefully, not reliably. A backtest tells you whether a set of rules would have survived conditions that already happened, which is worth knowing and is far better than guessing. What it cannot do is prove the rules will work next year, and the more parameters you tune to improve the historical result, the less the result means.
Why do I keep breaking my own trading rules?
Because the rules were written calmly and are executed under pressure, and the second state does not merely make worse decisions — it systematically prefers different ones. That is why willpower is the wrong tool: it is depleted exactly when it is needed. The fixes are structural. Place the stop as a resting order at entry so the exit needs no later decision, compute position size from account risk and stop distance so there is nothing to feel confident about, and write a daily loss limit before the day you hit it. A rule you break repeatedly is usually badly designed rather than insufficiently obeyed. Trading Psychology works through each failure and the checklist that catches most of them.
What does FOMO mean in trading?
Fear of missing out: entering a position because a move has already happened rather than because a setup you defined in advance appeared. The expensive part is not the late entry itself. An unplanned trade has no invalidation level nearby, so there is nothing to place a stop behind and nothing to compute a position size from, which means size ends up being chosen by feeling. Building a candidate list before the session is the practical defence, because a stock that is not on the list is not tradeable today however good it looks. The glossary defines the rest of the behavioural vocabulary in the same plain terms.
The long version
These guides are the outline. Trade Stocks Like A.I. is the same material worked through in full — 206 pages, over 200 annotated chart analyses, real trades with the reasoning behind each one, and the code to build and test a system yourself. Written by an economist with 26 years in the market, and available in 25 languages as an instant download.
These guides are educational material about how markets and trading methods work. They are not financial advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Trading involves the risk of losing money, including more than you intended if you use leverage.