Reading the market

This is the whole path, from the first question to the last. All sixty-two pieces are written — ten stages in the order that makes them easiest to learn, plus two reference pages to come back to. Start at the beginning if you are new; the stages assume the ones before them.

1. Stage 1

   What this is

   The questions everyone has on the first day and nobody answers in one place: what you are actually buying, when it trades, what it costs, and how much it moves.

   1. What a futures contract is
   2. The index futures, and what is inside them
   3. Why the NQ
   4. Minis and micros
   5. Sessions and trading hours
   6. Leverage and margin
   7. What it really costs to trade
   8. How much account you need
   9. Ticks, points and what a move is worth
   10. Market data: what a feed is and why it is paid for
   11. Contract codes
   12. The roll over
   13. Halts, limit up and limit down · the COT report

2. Stage 2

   Before you choose

   Not everyone should trade the same instrument, and not everyone should trade the same hours. Deciding that on purpose is cheaper than discovering it later.

   1. What kind of trader you are
   2. Choosing a market that fits you
   3. Not everyone trades the RTH session
   4. Which markets and which timeframes
   5. The simulator: what it teaches and what it cannot

3. Stage 3

   Reading a chart

   Before anything about flow: what you are looking at. Not every candle is built the same way, and that difference changes what the chart is telling you.

   1. Candle types: time, volume, range, tick, Renko and Heikin Ashi
   2. The anatomy of a candle
   3. Chart patterns
   4. Trend lines and the regression channel

4. Stage 4

   Buying and selling

   What actually happens when you press the button — and the orders that decide whether you are the one waiting or the one paying.

   1. How a price is made
   2. Order types: stop, limit, bracket, OCO
   3. Passive and aggressive orders

5. Stage 5

   The day

   A session is not a flat stretch of time. It has windows, each with its own character, and knowing them turns «price moves» into «at this hour, this happens».

   1. Anatomy of the RTH session
   2. The opening range
   3. Overnight inventory
   4. What a gap is and why it appears
   5. How the NQ reacts to news
   6. Earnings: why the NQ leans on a handful of companies
   7. Daily range: what to expect
   8. Preparation before the open

6. Stage 6

   The map

   Where the levels are and why price keeps returning to them. This is where the reading starts to look like the tools.

   1. Liquidity zones
   2. Confluence
   3. The four types of day
   4. Supply and demand: zones of interest

7. Stage 7

   Order flow

   The largest stage, and the one nobody gives away. Every instrument here is pointed at the same event: somebody crossed the spread, and the other side either held or ran out.

   1. How to read order flow
   2. The DOM, the order book
   3. The auction and how price forms
   4. The tape, and what makes it «smart»
   5. The footprint
   6. Delta
   7. Absorption
   8. Imbalances
   9. Auction Market Theory

8. Stage 8

   Volume profile

   Volume at price rather than volume over time — and the shapes a session leaves behind when you look at it that way.

   1. What it is and what it is made of
   2. The shapes: D, P and b
   3. Support and resistance with a profile
   4. The usual mistakes

9. Stage 9

   Putting it together

   Where the separate tools stop being separate. Context says where; flow says when; the profile says whether the level is worth anything.

   1. Technical analysis and order flow: the difference
   2. Combining context with flow
   3. Combining profile and footprint
   4. The six DOM columns
   5. Directional conviction

10. Stage 10

    Risk, and your own head

    Everyone publishes what a POC is. Almost nobody publishes why you lose after being right. This stage is the second one.

    1. Risk management: the rules
    2. The mind games of a fast market
    3. What kind of risk you are
    4. Journal, review and what to measure

11. Aside

    Funded accounts

    Not a step on the path — a decision about whose money you are trading, which some people take and others never do. Read it if and when it applies to you.

    1. Prop and funded accounts

12. Reference

    Indicators, one family at a time

    Not part of the path — eight pages to look things up in. What each one actually calculates, what it is good at, and what it does not tell you. Nothing here generates a signal, and the first page explains why nothing can.

    1. What an indicator is, and what it cannot be
    2. Trend: moving averages, the EMA cloud, MACD and ADX
    3. Momentum: RSI, stochastic, RVI and CCI
    4. Volatility: ATR, Bollinger, Keltner and the RVI
    5. VWAP, and why the anchor is the whole story
    6. Volume and open interest
    7. The Ehlers filters: treating price as a signal
    8. Fibonacci retracements: a grid, and what it is for

13. Reference

    Always open

    Not articles — two pages to come back to. One defines the shorthand; the other collects everything worth reading, with nothing on it that pays us.

    1. Abbreviations and acronyms
    2. Books, podcasts and places to look