Free Trading Course
71 in-depth guides written by the Captain — from complete beginner to confident trader.
Fundamentals
Price Action Trading: The Captain’s Complete Guide
Master Price Action to read the markets straight off the chart: Japanese candlesticks, market dynamics, support/resistance and order blocks.
Read the guide
The Wyckoff Method: A Pillar of Price Action
Discover the Wyckoff Method: how Richard Wyckoff read supply and demand through price and volume, and how to trade its accumulation and distribution phases.
Read the guide
Risk Management in Trading: How to Protect Your Capital
Risk management is what keeps you in the game: protect your capital, size every trade, and only take a loss when the trend truly turns.
Read the guide
Trading Strategy: How to Build Your Own
After my trading-plan tutorial, here’s my guide to building your trading system and strategy — and finally telling journal, plan, system and strategy apart.
Read the guide
How to Draw Support and Resistance: The Captain’s Guide
This isn’t just another blog post — it’s meant to be studied, not skimmed. Knowing how to draw support and resistance is one of the very first skills to master.
Read the guide
Limit Order: 3 Practical Use Cases
Three practical examples of how to use limit orders to enter and exit the market at exactly the price you want.
Read the guide
CME Group | Analyzing and Interpreting the Data
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group) plays a crucial role in understanding market dynamics — and the gap between its Bitcoin futures and the spot price can be a real opportunity to seize.
Read the guide
Futures and Perpetual Contracts: How They Work
Futures and perpetual contracts are derivatives that let you speculate on an asset’s future price — long or short — without ever owning it.
Read the guide
Trade Management: Captain Trading's 10 Principles
Finding the right moment to enter the market and building a trading plan on a chart is one task; managing that position through to its cancellation or full profit-taking is another.
Read the guide
Money Management vs Risk Management in Trading
In trading, what most people call money management is really risk management — here’s the difference, and how to manage your capital like a pro.
Read the guide
Stop Loss: How to Set an Effective SL
You set your Stop Loss the moment you enter a position — it’s a core part of your trading plan, and getting it right is what protects your capital.
Read the guide
Trade for Free: Is It Really Possible?!
Yes, you can trade for free — with testnets, demo accounts and paper trading — and it’s the essential step before you ever risk real money.
Read the guide
Pattern Trading: Chart Patterns Every Trader Should Know
A trading pattern can be dangerous, because it claims to confirm what no chart can truly certify.
Read the guide
Break-Even Point in Trading: How to Calculate It
Knowing your break-even point is essential to tell exactly when a trade turns profitable — on any market!
Read the guide
Liquidity in Crypto Trading: Analysis and Interpretation
This trading guide is designed to get you fully comfortable with the concept of liquidity: analysis and interpretation!
Read the guide
Trading Journal: How to Build One and Track Every Trade
A trading journal is the essential tool for documenting every trade you take, in detail and with purpose — the fastest way to see your progress and fix what isn’t working.
Read the guide
SP500 and Crypto: What’s the Correlation?
The SP500 tracks the 500 largest US companies — but does it really move in step with crypto? Here’s what the correlation looks like.
Read the guide
What Is a Market Maker? Role, Spread and How They Work
Market makers quietly keep the markets liquid — here’s who they are, how they earn the spread, and how to spot the bad ones in crypto.
Read the guide
Leverage and Futures Trading Explained
Leverage can multiply your gains just as fast as your losses — here’s how it really works and how to use it without blowing up your account.
Read the guide
MetaMask: How to Create a Hot Wallet
MetaMask is a free, easy-to-use hot wallet that keeps your crypto safe and lets you trade on decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Read the guide
The 4 Phases of a Market Cycle Explained
The four phases of a market cycle on a long-term chart are accumulation, uptrend, distribution and downtrend — here’s how to recognize each one and trade it.
Read the guide
Trading System: How to Build Your Own
After my trading plan guide, here’s the one on the trading system — and I’ll finally make the difference between your journal, your plan, and your system crystal clear.
Read the guide
Funding Rate Explained: What It Is and How to Read It
In this quick tutorial, I’ll walk you through the funding rate — one of the high-value technical indicators in my toolkit, right alongside Open Interest.
Read the guide
Crypto Market Cycle: What Is It and How to Profit From It
Understanding the crypto market cycle is essential — learn how money rotates between Bitcoin and altcoins, and how to profit from each phase of the cycle.
Read the guideThe 5 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Technical Analysis
Captain Trading.com offers tutorials for beginner and experienced traders — here are 5 classic mistakes to avoid in your technical analysis.
Read the guide
Trading Plan: How to Build Yours Step by Step
Captain Trading regularly publishes free trading courses to get you started — here is our tutorial on building a solid trading plan.
Read the guideStrategies
AI Trading: The Complete Guide + 1 Automated Strategy
AI trading puts artificial intelligence to work analyzing market data — surfacing investment ideas or trading on your behalf — plus a free automated BTC/ETH strategy to try.
Read the guide
Range Trading: How to Trade Sideways Markets
Crypto spends 80% of its time trapped in a range — and so do forex, commodities and most markets. Without a range-trading strategy, you’re missing most of the action.
Read the guide
Day Trading Explained: A Complete Guide for Beginners
Day trading is a thrilling, fast-paced style that can deliver big gains over short periods — but only if you master the fundamentals first.
Read the guide
Hedging: Risk Management and Capital Protection
Even as an experienced trader, risk is everywhere on the financial markets. To keep it under control, I regularly use Hedging. It's a particularly useful strategy…
Read the guide
Scalping Trading: Strategies, Tools and the Captain’s Tips
If scalping appeals to you, it’s probably because you want to smooth your equity curve with steadier, smaller, more frequent profits.
Read the guide
DCA Crypto: The Captain’s Guide to Dollar-Cost Averaging
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) means investing a fixed amount at regular intervals to smooth your entry price and tame crypto volatility—no market timing required.
Read the guide
Swing Trading Explained: Strategy, Tools and Risk
Choosing a trading style that fits you is a decisive step when you start out. Today, three styles dominate: scalping, day trading and swing trading.
Read the guide
SMC: A Theoretical Introduction to Smart Money Concepts
Are Smart Money Concepts (SMC) really revolutionary? ICT’s Smart Money ideas are everywhere on social media — here’s what they actually are.
Read the guide
Smart Money Concepts (SMC): What Are They Really?
Smart Money Concepts: a genuine edge or just the latest trading fad? A pro trader breaks down what SMC really is — and what it’s actually worth.
Read the guide
Short Squeeze Explained: How It Works and How to Trade It
Shorting lets you profit from falling markets — but a sudden short squeeze can trap the bears and send price exploding higher.
Read the guide
Straddle Strategy: How to Profit in Any Market Direction
Discover the straddle, the options strategy that lets you profit from a big price move without ever having to predict its direction.
Read the guideTechnical Indicators
Take Profit & Stop Loss with the Average True Range (ATR)
In high-risk markets like crypto, disciplined Take Profit and Stop Loss placement is what keeps you profitable over the long run.
Read the guide
Fear and Greed Index: Useful or Superficial?
In a perfect world, a stock's price always mirrors its underlying value — but markets run on emotion, and the Fear and Greed Index puts a number on it.
Read the guide
Moving Averages in Trading: SMA, EMA and How to Use Them
Master simple and exponential moving averages to sharpen your technical analysis, read trends, and time high-probability entries.
Read the guide
VWAP Trading: How to Use the Volume Weighted Average Price
Never heard of VWAP? Here’s your chance to fix that — meet the Volume Weighted Average Price, the volume-based benchmark used by algorithms and institutional traders.
Read the guide
Cumulative Volume Delta (CVD) in Trading, Explained
In this free trading course, I’ll walk you through a volume indicator I’ve come to rely on: the Cumulative Volume Delta, or CVD.
Read the guide
Ichimoku Cloud Explained: Theory and How to Read It
Ichimoku Kinko Hyo — ‘equilibrium at a glance’ — is better known as the Ichimoku cloud, a Japanese technical indicator that remains hugely popular today.
Read the guide
Open Interest Explained: How to Read It in Crypto Trading
Open Interest is one of the most important metrics in crypto trading — here’s what the number of open contracts reveals about liquidity and trend strength.
Read the guide
Bollinger Bands Explained: How to Trade Volatility
Learn how Bollinger Bands measure market volatility and help you spot squeezes, reversals and high-probability trade setups.
Read the guide
Volume Profile Explained: An Introduction for Traders
Understanding Volume Profile can prove genuinely useful when trading crypto — so, after our free Market Profile course, here is our introductory lesson on the Volume Profile.
Read the guide
Market Profile in Trading: Steidlmayer’s Method Explained
A free, complete guide to J. Peter Steidlmayer’s Market Profile — the theory and the practice of reading market-generated value.
Read the guide
Order Flow Trading: Reading the Flow Behind Price
Order Flow, like Order Block, is one of the ICT Smart Money Concepts (SMC) I use the most — here’s my completely free guide to reading the orders behind price.
Read the guide
Order Block Trading: SMC / ICT Strategy Explained
The order block concept comes from ICT’s Smart Money Concepts (SMC): learn to spot these institutional zones and highlight them on your charts.
Read the guide
Chop Index: Spot Range and Trend Phases
The Choppiness Index — or Chop Index — is one of my favorite indicators, quite possibly my number one, and I use it every single day to tell whether a market is trending or ranging.
Read the guide
Relative Strength Index (RSI): The Momentum Indicator Explained
A beginner-friendly tutorial that introduces you to the RSI: the Relative Strength Index.
Read the guide
Fibonacci Retracements: Sequence, Golden Ratio and Trading Levels
Fibonacci retracements turn a mathematician’s famous sequence into one of the most reliable tools for pinpointing reversal zones on your charts.
Read the guide
Introduction to Elliott Wave Theory
This introduction to Elliott Waves opens your mind to approaches beyond pure Price Action and shows how Ralph N. Elliott turned repeating market patterns into a trading theory.
Read the guide
Technical Indicators: My Top 3 Favorites
Technical indicators: here are the top 3 I actually use in my market analysis — and why a single indicator is never worth anything on its own.
Read the guide
Max Pain Price: The Max Pain Theory in Options Explained
The Max Pain Theory says that as expiration nears, options tend to gravitate toward the strike price where the most open contracts expire worthless.
Read the guidePsychology
Trading Psychology: Mastering the Trader’s Mindset
Trader psychology is the sum of every emotion you feel before, during and after a trade — learn to detach from them and trade with a clear head.
Read the guide
Investing Your Money: 6 Mistakes to Avoid
When it comes to investing your money, there are 6 mistakes you should avoid at all costs — the foundation for building the mindset, and maybe the method, of a true investor.
Read the guide
Poker & Trading: How a Gambling Game Can Train You to Trade
Becoming a trader — or a professional poker player — means constantly getting better at assessing your own risk while sharpening the way you play your edge.
Read the guide
How to Manage Stress in Trading: 10 Tips
Stress is everywhere in today’s world, and trading is no exception — here are 10 practical tips to keep a cool head in front of the markets.
Read the guideTrader Tools
Market Monkey Terminal: The Complete Order Flow Guide
Market Monkey is an advanced terminal for demanding traders who want to read the markets through Order Flow, liquidity structure, and pro tools like the DOM, Heatmap, and Volume Profile.
Read the guide
COT Reports: Commitments of Traders Explained
The Commitments of Traders (COT) reports reveal how the market’s biggest players are positioned — learn to read them to sharpen your trading bias.
Read the guide
Forex Factory Guide: Economic Calendar, News & Tools
Ever heard of Forex Factory? It has been the go-to forum for forex and traditional-market traders for 20 years, and most retail traders barely scratch its surface.
Read the guide
CoinMarketCal: The Ultimate Crypto & Economic Calendar
Investors, traders, or curious onlookers alike: if you care about crypto even a little, this is one crypto-monitoring tool you absolutely need to know.
Read the guide
Exocharts: The Captain's Guide to Reading Order Flow
In this new guide, I'll introduce you to Exocharts, a tool I use to read and interpret Order Flow.
Read the guide
Coinalyze: The Ultimate Guide to Crypto Futures Data
Coinalyze is a free, all-in-one platform that aggregates crypto trading data — with a special focus on Futures, Open Interest, Funding and Liquidations.
Read the guide
CoinMarketCap Explained: The Captain's Guide
CoinMarketCap delivers real-time data on thousands of cryptocurrencies — an essential tool for tracking prices, market caps and volumes across the whole crypto market.
Read the guide
TradingView: The Captain’s Complete Guide
In my view, TradingView is an essential tool for crypto traders: a flawless user experience and advanced technical analysis tools that let you work in the best possible conditions.
Read the guide
The Kingfisher: How to Spot Crypto Liquidation Zones
The Captain and the Kingfisher: king of fishermen, this bird shows you exactly where the market’s hidden liquidity pools are waiting.
Read the guide
CoinOptionsTrack Becomes BasedMoney
CoinOptionsTrack is becoming BasedMoney.io — the perfect chance to introduce this tool, which has become essential to how I read the crypto markets, and Open Interest on options in particular.
Read the guide
Flow Analysis: 5 Tools to Track Crypto Flows
CoinGecko just published an interesting article recommending several tools that can effectively support your market analysis. Personally, I mostly recommend using TradingView, BasedMoney…
Read the guide