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How to use this course

There have been a lot of courses written about trading. The vast majority of them give you some trading strategy, usually using technical analysis concepts.

This course teaches you how derivatives markets work and how to trade them using the strategies with logical reasoning and data to back them up. It runs from the mechanics of a single limit order all the way up to building a book of strategies with proper position sizing, and it assumes you're starting from zero. If you already trade, parts of the early material will be review, and later in this lesson you'll find three shortened paths that skip you ahead to what matters for your market. If you've never placed a trade, read it front to back and skip nothing.

What the course covers

The course has eleven parts. A short map helps before you commit to a route through it.

Part 0 is where you are now. The next lesson breaks down trading styles, from scalping to long-term investing, and makes the case for the swing-to-position horizon this platform is built around.

Part 1 covers market microstructure: the auction, the order book, spreads, market makers, and liquidity. This comes before any derivatives content because every market on the site, whether it's SPX options or a low cap crypto shitcoin, is the same machine. When you later read about liquidation cascades or dealer hedging flows, the mechanism will already be familiar.

Part 2 is the full map of derivatives markets: futures pricing and mechanics, the rates complex, swaps, options fundamentals, exotics, and crypto perpetuals. You'll probably never trade an interest rate swap, but swap hedging flows move the treasury futures you might trade, and structured product flows move the vol surfaces you'll definitely trade. You can't skip the plumbing just because you only live in one room of the house.

Part 3 covers options and volatility, from pricing intuition through the greeks, realized and implied volatility, the volatility risk premium, skew, term structure, dealer positioning, structure selection, and trade management.

Part 4 is futures: every contract is broken down, who trades each market and why, the COT report, positioning, seasonality, and term structure.

Part 5 is about crypto perpetuals: open interest, funding, liquidations, orderbook depth, crypto options, cycles, exchange risk, and more.

Part 6 covers market regimes and the cross-asset tools: the VIX complex, credit spreads, breadth, momentum, relative value, and trading around scheduled macro events.

Part 7 is technical analysis: what actually holds up in the data, why it works when it works, and how to use charts as an execution layer rather than a belief system.

Part 8 is the strategies. Twelve lessons that turn everything before them into specific, tradeable approaches: positioning trades in crypto and futures, regime trading, momentum, skew trades, and the volatility-selling strategies. Each strategy lesson leans on concepts built earlier, which is why the strategies come late rather than first.

Part 9 is the quantitative backbone: statistics, expectancy, backtesting pitfalls, volatility-based sizing, the Kelly criterion, drawdown math, where returns come from, and portfolio construction.

Part 10 closes the course and sits slightly apart from the rest and can be optional, but it is something I have found a lot of value in: using AI models as a working tool. What language models can and cannot do for a trader, how to prompt them so they argue with you instead of flattering you, using them for research, for writing backtest and data-pipeline code, and where they fit in a daily workflow.

Prerequisites

The course doesn't assume you know what a call option is, what open interest means, or why futures exist. Every term gets defined the first time it appears, and the math stays at the level of arithmetic and the occasional standard deviation. Where a formula matters, the lesson explains what it means before showing it. Where a formula doesn't matter, you get the intuition and nothing else.

What the course does assume is that you'll do the work.

For all the examples you will see in the course, I have used data from this platform. If you decide to subscribe, you will be able to get the same data as well.

Three paths through the course

Front to back is the default and the best option if you have the time. It's a long read, so it gets written and consumed part by part. If you already trade one of the three markets and want to reach useful material faster, pick the path below that matches. Every path starts with Part 0 and Part 1, because the microstructure material is short and everything else stands on it, and every path ends with Part 9 in full.

The options trader path

You trade or want to trade equity options: volatility, earnings, spreads. Read Parts 0 and 1, then from Part 2 read the lessons on why derivatives exist, options fundamentals, and put-call parity. Then read all of Part 3. It's the centerpiece of the course and the ladder only works if you climb every rung: greeks before volatility, volatility before the premium, the premium before structures, structures before management.

After Part 3, read Part 6 for regime context, then the strategy lessons on VRP harvesting, earnings volatility, pre-earnings positioning, forward volatility, skew trades, and building the book. Then Part 9.

The futures swing trader path

You trade futures or want to: index, energy, metals, grains, currencies. Read Parts 0 and 1, then from Part 2 the lessons on why derivatives exist, forwards and futures pricing, futures mechanics, and the rates complex. Then all of Part 4: the contract breakdowns, the participants, the COT report, positioning, seasonality, and term structure. Positioning data is only useful once you know who is on each side of the market and why, so the participants lesson is the one people skip and shouldn't.

Then Part 6 for regime and macro events, Part 7 for the execution layer (positioning gives you the idea, technicals give you the entry), the strategy lesson on futures positioning, and Part 9.

On the platform, your tools are the futures analysis pages (COT positioning, seasonality, monthly statistics), the futures screener with its COT index and week-over-week change columns, the futures Lens for options IV on the contracts that have listed options, the global futures dashboard for category-level positioning, and the events calendar for the macro schedule.

The crypto trader path

You trade perpetuals. Read Parts 0 and 1, then from Part 2 the lessons on why derivatives exist, futures pricing, options fundamentals, and especially the crypto perpetuals lesson, since funding and liquidation mechanics are the physics of your entire market. Then all of Part 5. Then Part 6 (crypto now trades macro events as hard as any asset), Part 7 for execution, the strategy lesson on crypto positioning, and Part 9. If you plan to touch BTC or ETH options, add the volatility lessons from Part 3 first; the crypto options lesson in Part 5 assumes them.

On the platform, your tools are the crypto analysis pages (open interest, funding, liquidations, and options for the majors), the global dashboard with aggregated flows and the risk appetite index, the crypto screener with z-scored signals across every perpetual the platform tracks, and the momentum page for trend context.

How to actually work through it

If you are really dedicated to learning, I would recommend getting an active subscription on the website. You can use code "ANALYTICS" to get 50% off your first month. When a lesson explains the volatility risk premium, pull up a symbol and look at its VRP chart while you read. When the COT lessons describe commercials fading a rally, open a contract where that is happening right now. The concepts stick when they're attached to live data instead of a stylized diagram, and the platform is the lab this course was written for.

Do the practice problems when they appear. They are short and they are diagnostic: if you can't work out a synthetic position from put-call parity or read an OI-and-price combination, the next lessons will be harder than they need to be, and it's cheaper to find that out in a practice problem than in a position.

Pace matters less than order. One lesson a day finishes the whole course in about three months; three a week is fine too. What breaks the course is reading out of order within a part, because lessons reference earlier ones freely and without warning. Between parts you have more freedom, which is what the paths above exploit.

Finally, resist the urge to jump straight to Part 8. The strategies are the reason most people show up, and they'll still be there after you've built the base to actually run them. A strategy you can execute but can't explain falls apart at the first drawdown, because you can't tell the difference between normal variance and a broken edge. That distinction is the whole game, and it's exactly what the earlier parts teach.

The next lesson takes an honest look at the ways people actually trade, from scalping to buy-and-hold, and what each one demands in time, capital, and edge. It also explains why this platform, and this course, are built around the swing-to-position horizon rather than the intraday grind. Read it even if you think you already know where you fit.

Trading styles and where you fit

When it comes to retail trading, day trading / scalping is definitely the most popular trading style. Watching a 20-year-old kid printing money on a 1-minute chart is definitely cooler than reading about a macro trader who held a bond position for eight months. Most people then spend two years failing at a style that was never available to them in the first place.

How many hours a day can you actually watch a screen? How much capital do you have? How much are you paying per trade relative to what a trade can make you? Where would your edge even come from at that speed? Answer those questions honestly and the range of viable styles collapses fast, usually to one or two. This lesson walks through every major trading style, what each one demands, what each one costs, and how each one kills the people who choose it badly. By the end you should know where you sit, and you should understand why everything in this course is built for one particular region of the map.

The six questions that sort every trading style

Before going style by style, here's the grid every style gets run through. These six dimensions do all the work.

Time demanded is the first and least negotiable. Some styles are full-time jobs with mandatory attendance. Others need an hour in the evening. If you have a career, a family, or a time zone that puts the US session at 3 a.m., that fact alone eliminates styles regardless of how appealing they look.

Capital efficiency is how hard your money works. A style that recycles the same capital ten times a day extracts more from a small account than one that parks it in a single position for a month. This is why underfunded traders gravitate toward short horizons: leverage and turnover let a small account swing at real dollar amounts. It's also why they blow up, but we'll get to that.

Cost drag is the tax you pay on every trade: commissions, the bid-ask spread, slippage, funding, borrow. Cost drag scales with trade frequency almost perfectly, so the faster you trade, the larger your gross edge has to be just to reach zero. This single number, costs as a fraction of average profit per trade, explains more failed trading careers than any psychological flaw.

Edge source is the question of why the market should pay you at all. Every style has a natural habitat of edges. Over seconds, the only edges are microstructural: queue position, latency, reading the order flow. Over weeks, edges come from positioning imbalances, volatility risk premia, carry, and slow-moving flows. Over years, the main edge is simply being willing to hold risk that others pay to shed. A style is only viable if you can plausibly access an edge that lives at its horizon.

Psychological load is real but often misdiagnosed. The load isn't "can you handle stress" in the abstract. It's specific to the style: a scalper's load is making hundreds of instant decisions without tilting after a loss, a swing trader's load is going to bed with open risk, a position trader's load is watching a winning thesis retrace for six weeks without touching it. People who are calm in one mode fall apart in another.

Every trading style has a characteristic way it destroys accounts. Knowing the failure mode in advance is worth more than knowing the success stories, because you'll meet the failure mode personally and the success stories are survivorship.

Scalping and intraday trading

Scalping means holding for seconds to minutes, aiming for a few ticks at a time. Intraday trading is similar but usually holds for slightly longer while still closing within the session and holds nothing overnight. Both live at the fast end of the map, and both are dominated by the same arithmetic, so take them together.

Start with the cost math, because it's brutal and it is not optional. The e-mini S&P contract trades with a spread of one tick, worth $12.50. If you take liquidity on entry and exit, which most retail intraday traders do most of the time, you pay roughly one full spread per round trip, plus a few dollars of commission. Call it $16 per round trip per contract. A scalper doing 20 round trips a day is paying around $320 a day in friction on a single contract. Over 250 trading days that's roughly $80,000 a year, per contract, that the strategy has to earn before the trader makes a cent. In crypto the same logic applies through taker fees of several basis points per side: trade a full account's notional in and out five times a day and the annual fee bill runs to a large fraction of the account.

That number frames everything else about the style. To overcome it, an intraday trader needs a genuine edge at the scale of minutes, and at that scale the competition is professional market-making and high-frequency firms whose entire business is the next tick. They're faster than you by orders of magnitude, they pay a fraction of your costs (often negative costs, since they earn the spread rather than paying it), and they see order flow granularity you don't. The honest question for an aspiring scalper is: what do I know about the next 90 seconds that the fastest, best-informed participants in the market don't? There are real answers to that question. Some traders develop a genuine feel for order flow, for where stops are resting, for when a large buyer is working an order clumsily. The microstructure lessons coming up in the next part explain exactly what those footprints are. But the population of people who can read them well enough to beat a large annual cost hurdle is small, and almost none of them got there in under several years of full-time screen time.

The other constraints stack up the same way. Time demanded: total. Intraday trading is attendance-based. Miss the two good hours of the session and you missed the day. Capital efficiency is the style's one real advantage: intraday margin on futures is a fraction of overnight margin at many brokers, no position gaps against you while you sleep, and the same capital recycles all day.

Psychological load is the highest of any style. Hundreds of decisions per week, each made in seconds, each with immediate feedback. Loss responses that would be harmless at slower speeds (revenge trading, doubling size to get back to even) execute in minutes, and a single tilted afternoon can erase a month. The characteristic failure mode is the slow grind rather than one catastrophic trade: a trader with no real microstructure edge and full exposure to the cost drag, bleeding a little every week, working harder and harder at refining entries when the problem was never the entries. The account doesn't explode. It erodes, along with a couple of years.

Intraday trading is legitimate. I started day-trading back in 2018 in European indices and bond futures before moving to crypto. While I was able to make money, it is safe to say that by 2022 I got completely burned out and tired of spending hours watching charts and order flow every day. Day trading is the hardest style on this list by a wide margin, the most expensive to run, the most time-hungry, and the one where your competition is most professional, and, let's be realistic, you probably can't compete with some sixteen-year-old autist at Jane Street running an HFT system in ES futures despite your YouTube guru telling you the opposite. If you attempt it, do it with the microstructure knowledge from Part 1. The remainder of this course won't focus on short-term trading at all, but this should give you a decent grounding.

Swing trading

Swing trading holds positions for days to weeks. It's the horizon my trading is built around, so it gets a fair but complete treatment, failure modes included.

The cost picture inverts. A swing trade on that same e-mini contract might target a move of 100 points, worth $5,000 per contract, against the same $16 or so of round-trip friction. Costs are now a rounding error, a few tenths of a percent of the gross, instead of the dominant term. This changes what kind of edge you need: instead of a large edge harvested many times against high costs, you need a modest edge harvested a few dozen times a year against almost no costs. Modest, persistent edges are far easier to find than large, fast ones.

They are easier to find because of what lives at this horizon. Well-documented risk premium in terms of momentum, mean-reversion, or carry can be built across different asset classes.

Time demand for swing trading is still there but much lighter compared to day trading. The work is mostly analysis, reviewing positioning, vol, and setups, plus brief check-ins around executions. An hour or two a day is often enough, and the specific hour barely matters because nothing about the style requires reacting within minutes. It coexists with a full-time job without degrading either, which no faster style can claim.

The downside is that capital efficiency drops, positions are held on full overnight margin, capital turns over slowly, and a good year might be built from 50 or 100 trades rather than thousands, so a small account grows in absolute terms more slowly than a successful intraday account would (the comparison flatters intraday only if you ignore the failure rate). Overnight and weekend risks are introduced besides earnings surprises, geopolitical headlines, crypto cascades, all of it lands on your open positions while you sleep, and no intraday stop protects you from a gap through it.

Psychological load is moderate but distinct, the art of sitting on your hands. You will hold a position through two days of adverse movement that means nothing, and flatness will feel like negligence. The characteristic failure mode follows directly from that feeling: the swing trader who can't tolerate the quiet degenerates into an intraday trader without noticing, fiddling with entries, watching a 5-minute chart with a multi-day or multi-week view, cutting winners early because of fear that trades will retrace, adding trades out of boredom. The turnover creeps up, the cost drag and decision fatigue of the faster style arrive without its skill set, and the results converge to the intraday failure mode. The second failure mode is sample-size impatience: at 50 to 100 trades a year, luck and variance dominate any single quarter, and traders abandon sound approaches during ordinary variance.

Position trading and macro

Stretch the horizon to weeks and months and you get position trading; frame it around economies, central banks, and cross-asset themes and it gets called macro. The mechanics are the same: few positions, held long, driven by slow variables.

The edges here are the slowest and best documented of all: carry in its many forms, seasonal pressures in commodities with physical supply cycles, regime persistence (bull markets and tightening cycles run for quarters), valuation extremes that resolve over months. These edges aren't secrets. They persist because harvesting them requires holding uncomfortable risk for a long time, and most capital either can't or won't. The compensation for discomfort and patience is the whole trade.

Costs approach zero as a fraction of the target move, and time demanded is the lowest of any active style: a weekly review genuinely suffices, and reacting to anything within the hour is almost never necessary. Capital efficiency is the worst on the list. Capital sits in a handful of positions for months, drawdowns are measured in weeks or quarters rather than days, and the annual trade count might be in the single digits per market. This has a hidden statistical cost: at ten trades a year, distinguishing skill from luck takes many years. A position trader can run a broken process for half a decade and never receive a clear signal from the market that it's broken.

The psychological load is pure patience under fire. A valid macro thesis can move against you 10 percent before it works, and holding through that retrace without folding, while also not holding a genuinely wrong thesis all the way down, is the entire skill. Which points at the characteristic failure mode: thesis stubbornness. Because the style's identity is "long-term view," losses get reframed as early entries and stops get treated as optional, since any exit can be deferred by appeal to the horizon. The position trader's account dies from a small number of large, slow losses that were rationalized the whole way down. The defense is mechanical: predefined invalidation levels and a maximum loss per theme, set before entry, never renegotiated. The lesson late in the course on removing decisions from the moment of temptation is aimed straight at this.

Position trading combines well with swing trading rather than competing with it. The same positioning and regime data that generates swing entries also identifies the season-long backdrops worth expressing at bigger horizons, and the two books diversify each other in time.

Investing: the baseline everything must beat

Buying a broad index fund and doing nothing is a trading style, and it's the one every other style on this list must be measured against. Whether you benchmark against SPY, QQQ, or Bitcoin, it doesn't make much sense to watch charts every day if you can't beat a simple buy and hold. Investing has near-zero cost drag, near-zero time demand, no leverage, and a well-documented positive expected return: over long periods, broad equity indexes have returned mid-single digits annually above cash, as payment for bearing equity risk. That return arrives with brutal interruptions, drawdowns of 30 to 50 percent a few times per generation, but it requires no skill, no screen time, and no edge.

This matters for two reasons. First, it's the honest benchmark. Active trading consumes hundreds of hours a year. If your trading returns don't beat the index by enough to pay for those hours and the extra risk, the index was the better trade, and there is no shame in that conclusion. Most people who attempt active trading would end up wealthier taking it. Second, investing pairs with trading instead of competing against it: it's the default allocation for capital your trading doesn't need. A sensible structure for almost everyone is a passive core that compounds untouched, with a defined trading account beside it, sized so that its total loss would be painful but not life-changing. That structure also fixes the most common beginner distortion: trading with money that can't afford to lose, which forces oversized positions and makes every normal drawdown feel like an emergency.

Investing's failure mode is worth naming because it's so consistent: capitulation at the bottom. The style requires no skill except during the handful of weeks per decade when everything is down 40 percent and selling feels like prudence. People who sold there converted a temporary drawdown into a permanent loss, and it's the single largest gap between investment returns and investor returns. This is obviously true for markets with documented decades of positive returns such as index funds, not some shitcoin you were promised by a Twitter influencer that will go up forever.

Systematic, discretionary, and the middle ground

Everything so far described horizon. The second axis is independent of it and it goes into how decisions get made. A scalper and a macro fund can both be fully systematic; a swing trader can be fully discretionary. Where you sit on this axis matters as much as where you sit on the horizon axis.

Fully systematic trading means rules decide everything: what to trade, when to enter, how much, when to exit. The rules can be tested on history, which is the approach's great advantage: you can know, within the limits of backtesting honesty, whether the thing ever worked before you risk money on it. The removal of in-the-moment emotion is the second advantage. The costs are less advertised. Building honest tests is a skill in itself with an entire failure literature (overfitting, look-ahead, survivorship; a later part of the course covers some backtesting pitfalls). And the psychological load doesn't disappear, it relocates: instead of deciding whether to enter a trade, you must decide, in month four of a drawdown, whether the system is broken or merely unlucky, with real money draining while you deliberate. Traders who override their systems at exactly those moments get the worst of both worlds, and most untrained people override.

Fully discretionary trading means judgment decides everything. Its advantage is adaptability: a human can incorporate context no rule anticipated, notice that today's setup is technically valid but sits the day before a central bank meeting, and pass. Its weakness is unfalsifiability. A discretionary process can't be backtested, every trade is a sample of one from a process that may itself be drifting, and it's genuinely possible to trade discretionarily for years without ever finding out whether you have an edge or an expensive habit. Discretionary trading also maximizes exposure to every bias in the book, because every decision is made live, under stress, by the machinery those biases run on.

While I run some fully systematic strategies, the middle ground is where most of my trading is done, and it's where this course lives: systematic signal generation, discretionary selection, systematic risk. The data and screens define, mechanically, what is worth looking at: positioning at an extreme, vol priced rich against realized, funding stretched, a regime reading that favors one direction. You apply judgment to which of those candidates to take and how to time the entry. Then the rules take over again for everything after entry: position size from a formula, stop placement from volatility, maximum risk per trade, stop-loss trailed based on ATR and so on. Judgment where humans add value, in synthesis and selection. Rules where humans reliably destroy value, in sizing and exits. The result is falsifiable enough to improve (the signals have testable statistics) and flexible enough to survive contact with contexts the rules never met.

Frequency, feedback, and how long until you know

One consequence of style choice gets almost no attention and quietly shapes everything: how fast the market tells you the truth about yourself.

Trading results are a noisy sample from an unknown distribution. The more trades you make, the faster the noise averages away and the true expectancy shows through. A scalper making 40 trades a day generates a statistically meaningful sample in weeks. If the edge isn't there, the account says so quickly and unambiguously, which is a genuine mercy. A swing trader at 40 trades a year needs a year or two before results mean much. A position trader at 8 trades a year may need most of a decade. Slow styles are cheap to run but expensive to evaluate.

This cuts both ways and creates a real tension. Fast styles have quick feedback but a high cost hurdle and professional competition. Slow styles have accessible edges and low costs but feedback so slow that discipline must substitute for evidence: you can't wait for your equity curve to validate the process, so the process itself has to be validated another way. That means grounding it in mechanisms and premia that are documented across decades of data and understanding why they pay, which is precisely what the rest of this course is for. When you trade a swing or position style, your confidence has to come from understanding the edge, because it can't come from your last month's P&L. Your last month's P&L, at these horizons, is mostly noise.

It also reframes drawdowns. At 40 trades a year with a plausible edge, losing streaks of five or six trades are ordinary arithmetic, and flat six-month stretches are unremarkable. Traders who don't internalize this abandon sound approaches at statistically meaningless low points, then adopt whatever worked recently, which is how a trading career becomes a tour of styles at their local peaks.

The comparison in one place

Read the table as a set of constraints, not a menu of preferences. Circle the rows where your life already fixes the answer (time available, capital, tolerance for slow feedback) and see which column survives.

Why this course sits at swing to position

Everything that follows in this course is built for the swing-to-position band, run semi-systematically, and the reasons are now visible rather than asserted.

The data this platform produces lives at that horizon. Positioning reports arrive weekly. Options surfaces, volatility premia, and funding rates update daily and express over days to weeks. Regime and momentum reads change over weeks. None of this information helps you with the next five minutes, and all of it bears directly on the next five days to five months. A style is only as good as the information advantage feeding it, and daily and weekly data feeds a daily and weekly style.

The edges at this horizon are the accessible ones. They're documented across long histories, they exist because someone is paying to transfer risk rather than because someone is slow, and harvesting them requires analysis and patience rather than speed and infrastructure. An individual with a screen, good data, and discipline is adequately equipped for this competition. The same individual is structurally outgunned in the microstructure game.

The cost math works. At swing frequency, friction is a fraction of a percent of target moves, so a modest edge survives contact with reality instead of being taxed to death.

And the style fits actual lives. The strategies in this course are executable in an hour or two a day, at whatever hour suits you, which means they can be run properly for years, and years is what the feedback math demands. A style you can't sustain long enough to evaluate isn't a style, it's an episode.

The semi-systematic frame is the honest response to slow feedback: signals defined mechanically so they can be tested and trusted, judgment applied at selection, and sizing and exits ruled by formulas because that is where discretion does its damage. Later parts of the course build each layer in order: first how markets and instruments actually work, then the signals themselves, then the risk machinery that keeps you solvent long enough for the edge to show up.

If you came in wanting to scalp, nothing here forbids it, but do it with open eyes: the cost arithmetic above isn't pessimism, it's subtraction. And whatever style you land on, the next part of the course is for you, because it explains the machine every style operates inside: how prices actually form, who is on the other side of your orders, and what it costs to transact. That machinery is the scalper's whole edge and the swing trader's execution bill, and understanding it is where real trading education starts.