An honest, growing ledger of trading questions
Ask the question a marketing page just won't answer.
Every entry here is a real question about trading systems, indicators, and automation — answered straight, graded to match how deep the question runs, and read aloud if your hands are busy on a chart.
- No email wall
- No course to buy
- Recommended books & tools are affiliate links, always labelled
- The answer's never hidden behind them
§01 Browse the ledger
Every question, filed where you'd look for it.
| Category | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | Terminology, first indicators, why demo accounts exist |
| Expert Advisors & Automation | Building, testing, and trusting a robot with real money |
| Indicators & Signals | What each one actually measures, and what it doesn't |
| Backtesting & Optimisation | Why your backtest lied to you, and how to ask it better questions |
| Risk & Money Management | Position sizing, drawdown, the maths the sales video leaves out |
| Platforms, Brokers & Execution | Spread, slippage, swap, and the fine print that moves your P&L |
| Psychology & Discipline | The part no indicator fixes |
| Myths & Marketing, Debunked | Claims that don't survive an honest backtest |
→ every category can be filtered Level 1–3, so you can go as deep as you actually need.
§02 Random Walk
Not sure where to start? Take a random walk.
Just click Level 1, 2, or 3 below for a random article from the site you haven't read yet.
§03 Read aloud
For when your eyes are elsewhere.
Every answer has a play button. Pick a level and a voice, and hear a real sample instead of reading.
§04 Learning Development
Play along, if you're up for it.
Every article here ends with a short quiz — a handful of playful questions on exactly what you just read. You don't have to take it, but it's worth a try: actively recalling something locks it in far better than reading it once and moving on, and it turns a dry topic into a quick, satisfying game against yourself. No score is tracked, no login needed — just you, a few questions, and the chance to prove the answer actually stuck.
§05 Graded by depth
Three levels. Find where you fit.
Every question in the ledger is written for one of three levels of experience — plain and clear for beginners, practical once you know the basics, and precise for anyone building their own systems. Browse by level to find the answers that match where you're at.
"What is a pip?"
A pip is the smallest standard price move in a currency pair — for most pairs it's the fourth decimal place (0.0001), so if EUR/USD moves from 1.0850 to 1.0851, that's one pip. It's just the ruler traders use to measure how far a price has moved, so "the trade moved 15 pips" means the same thing whether you're trading a £100 account or a £100,000 one.
"How do I size a position from my stop-loss distance?"
Decide how much of your account you're willing to risk on the trade (commonly 1–2%), then divide that cash amount by your stop-loss distance in pips times the pip value for your lot size. Risking 1% of a £10,000 account is £100; if your stop is 25 pips away and one standard lot's pip value is roughly £8, £100 ÷ (25 × £8) works out to about 0.5 lots. Get this step wrong and every other part of your strategy — win rate, R:R, edge — stops mattering.
"How should I model slippage when backtesting a scalping EA?"
A fixed-pip slippage assumption understates cost on a scalper, since slippage scales with spread volatility and order-book depth at the moment of execution, not with an average. Pull tick-level spread data, bucket it by time-of-day and news-window vs. calm periods, and sample slippage stochastically from the matching bucket's empirical distribution per trade rather than applying one constant. Cross-check against live-forward-tested fills for 4–6 weeks before trusting the backtest's net-of-cost curve — scalping edges are thin enough that a mis-modelled 0.3-pip average can flip a strategy from profitable to not.
§06 Why this exists
For years I've built and tested trading indicators and automated systems mostly for myself — the kind of quiet, unglamorous work that never makes it into a sales page. Development has moved fast enough recently that I wanted a place of my own to put it to use properly, instead of another course, another signal group, another "proven system" with the real risk buried in a footnote.
So here's what I'm doing instead: I sat down with an AI that has genuinely read more about trading, markets, and system design than any one person could in several lifetimes, and I started asking it the questions I actually wanted answered — the ones I had, and the ones I should have had. I read every answer critically before it went up here. Some confirmed what I already knew. Plenty pointed me toward things I hadn't considered — the kind of gap you don't know you have until something fills it.
I'm telling you this plainly because I think you deserve to know: the articles here are AI-written, and I use it deliberately and openly, not to flood the internet with more noise but to do the opposite. If someone had read every book and page ever written on this subject and would sit down and actually answer your question honestly, for free, wouldn't you ask? That's what this is. You're still the one casting the critical eye over the answer — I just wanted the first draft to come from something that's actually read everything.
I built this because I was tired of searching for an honest answer and finding a landing page instead — three paragraphs of real content, then a wall asking for my email before I could read the part that mattered. Every answer here is complete on the page. No sign-up. No "unlock the rest." If it's useful, it's yours.
§07 What's on the bench
I've got years of trading projects sitting in folders that never saw daylight — indicators, robots, a few genuinely useful tools, and at least one or two that exist purely because I thought they were funny at 2am. This question ledger is the first thing I'm bringing out into the open. More is coming: real tools, not just answers, and I'll keep adding to the index every week for as long as there are questions left to ask.