Reading a candlestick
Each candle covers one period (e.g. 5 minutes). The body spans the open and close; the thin wicks show the highest and lowest price reached. Green: it closed higher than it opened. Red: lower.
Crypto Academy
Learn by doing.
16 one-minute lessons, in the order traders usually need them. Each one is also available right next to the tool it explains while you trade — look for the ? buttons.
1 · Read the market
What the chart and the order book are really telling you.
Volume confirms moves
The bars at the bottom show how much was traded in each candle. A breakout on high volume is more convincing than one on thin volume. Sudden volume spikes often mark news, liquidations or whales.
The order book
Resting limit orders waiting to be filled: bids (buyers, green) below the price, asks (sellers, red) above. Walls of size can act as short-term support or resistance, but they can also be cancelled in a split second.
The trade tape
Every executed trade, live. Green means a buyer was in a hurry and paid the ask; red means a seller hit the bid. ⚡ marks whale-sized trades. A run of large green prints is buying pressure in action.
2 · Place smart orders
The hidden costs of trading and how to choose your price.
The spread: a hidden cost
The gap between the best bid and the best ask. A market buy pays the ask and a market sell receives the bid, so you lose the spread on every round trip, on top of fees. Liquid coins have tiny spreads; small caps can be expensive.
3 · Use indicators wisely
Tools that summarise price action — and their traps.
Moving averages (MA 20 / MA 50)
The average closing price of the last 20 or 50 candles. They smooth out noise to show the trend. Price above a rising MA suggests an uptrend; the short MA crossing the long one is a classic (and often late) trend signal.
Bollinger Bands
A 20-period average with bands two standard deviations above and below. Narrow bands mean a calm market, often before a big move. Touching a band is not a signal on its own: in strong trends, price can ride a band for a long time.
RSI: momentum, not a signal
The Relative Strength Index compares recent gains to recent losses on a 0–100 scale. Above 70 is called overbought, below 30 oversold. Strong trends can stay overbought for days, so combine RSI with price action before acting.
4 · Leverage without getting wrecked
Futures, liquidation and funding: the rules that wipe out most traders.
Leverage multiplies everything
With 10× leverage, $100 of margin controls a $1,000 position. A 5% move becomes a 50% gain — or a 50% loss — on your margin. Professionals rarely use more than 2–5×; 100× means a 1% wobble can wipe you out.
Liquidation: the exchange closes you
If losses eat your margin down to the maintenance level, the exchange force-closes the position and keeps the margin. The liquidation price is shown before you open: if it's close to the current price, your position can die from normal noise.
Funding: the cost of holding a perpetual
Perpetual futures never expire. Instead, every 8 hours (on most coins) longs pay shorts when the funding rate is positive, and the reverse when negative. It keeps the contract price close to spot — and slowly drains positions held for weeks.
Mark price vs. last price
Exchanges liquidate on the mark price — a fair price built from several spot markets — not on the last trade. That protects you from a single weird trade (a wick) on one exchange triggering your liquidation.
Shorting: profit from a fall
A short position gains when the price goes down. Because a price can rise without limit, a short's potential loss is unlimited without a stop-loss — which is exactly why isolated margin and liquidation exist.
5 · Going live, safely
If you ever trade real money: where, how to lock it down, and where to keep it.
Is your platform allowed where you live?
A licensed platform must keep your money apart from its own, hold capital and answer to a regulator. In the EU, that's a MiCA licence since July 2026 — Binance and Bitget don't have one. Check the exact company name on your regulator's register, not on the platform's site.
Phishing beats hacking
Most stolen crypto isn't hacked: it's handed over on a fake site or to a fake support agent. Use an authenticator app (not SMS), bookmark the real address, and remember: no real support will ever ask for your password, your 2FA code or your recovery words.
Not your keys, not your coins
Coins left on an exchange are a promise from that exchange: if it fails, you queue with everyone else. A hardware wallet keeps the keys with you. Write the 12–24 recovery words on paper or metal — never in a photo, a cloud note or a chat — and test with a small amount first.
Ready for a real test?
Replay the FTX collapse and see if your new skills would have protected you.
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