Education
Learn the market before you risk anything in it.
Everything below is open to anyone with a demo account, and free. Written by the people on our dealing desk, which is also why none of it promises you a win rate.
- 19lessons across three levels
- 40terms in the glossary
- 4desk notes published this fortnight
Learn to trade
Three levels, in the order they are useful.
Each lesson is a short video with a written summary and a demo-account exercise. Nothing is gated, nothing needs a deposit, and you can take them out of order — though level three is the one most traders wish they had taken first.
Foundations
What a quote actually says, and what a position is worth. Start here if you have never placed an order.
- What a currency pair is, and which side you are really buying
- Reading a quote: bid, ask and the spread between them
- Lots, pips and what one point is worth on your account
- Leverage and margin — related, but not the same thing
- Placing a first order on a demo account, step by step
- The four sessions, and when each pair actually moves
Building a method
Turning a view into a rule you can repeat. No indicator folklore, no promises about win rates.
- Trend, range, and the distinction that changes your entry
- Support and resistance: why levels hold, and why they fail
- Moving averages without the mythology
- Momentum and RSI — including what they do not tell you
- Using the economic calendar as a timing tool
- Backtesting a rule honestly, survivorship bias included
- Writing a plan you can still follow at three in the morning
Managing risk
The part that decides whether the other two matter. Sizing, stops, and the arithmetic of a drawdown.
- Position sizing from account risk, not from conviction
- Where a stop belongs, and where it merely gets taken
- Drawdown arithmetic: why -50% needs +100% to recover
- Correlation, or how you took the same trade four times
- Overnight swaps and the real cost of holding a position
- Keeping a journal that tells you something you did not know
Market analysis
What the desk is actually watching.
Published as it is written, not on a content schedule. Analysis is commentary, not a recommendation: nothing here takes account of your circumstances or your position.
FX strategy
EUR/USD into the ECB: what the options market is priced for
One-week risk reversals have flipped for the first time since March. We look at what that implies for the range, and where it has been wrong before.
Hélène Marchand · 6 min read
Macro
Dollar funding thins into month end
Cross-currency basis widened again on Tuesday. A short note on why the last two hours of the month are the worst time to size up.
Peter Osei · 4 min read
Commodities
Gold at record highs: positioning, not panic
Managed money is long, but not extremely so. We compare the current build-up with the 2020 and 2024 peaks and where each one broke.
Ana Ruiz · 7 min read
Market structure
Why your fills get worse at 22:00 CET
Liquidity providers roll their books at the same moment. Our own execution data from the last quarter, and what to do with it.
Tom Whitfield · 5 min read
The week ahead
- 14:30 CET US Core CPI (m/m) High impact
- 10:00 CET EU ECB refinancing rate decision High impact
- 08:00 CET UK GDP, second estimate (q/q) Medium impact
- 20:00 CET US FOMC minutes Medium impact
- 14:30 CET US Non-farm payrolls High impact
Illustrative schedule for this demonstration site. Release times follow the publishing bodies and are shown in CET.
Trading glossary
Every term we use, defined plainly.
If a word appears anywhere on this site — in the pricing table, in a statement, in a message from the desk — it is defined here, in the sense we actually use it.
A
- Ask
- The price at which you can buy. Always the higher of the two prices quoted.
B
- Balance
- Closed-trade cash in the account. It ignores anything still open — see Equity.
- Base currency
- The first currency in a pair. In EUR/USD you are buying or selling the euro.
- Bid
- The price at which you can sell. Always the lower of the two prices quoted.
C
- CFD
- A contract for difference: you settle the change in price, without owning the underlying instrument.
- Carry
- The interest earned or paid for holding a position overnight. Positive one way, negative the other.
- Correlation
- How closely two instruments move together. Four correlated positions are closer to one trade than to four.
- Cross rate
- A pair that does not include the US dollar, such as EUR/GBP.
D
- Depth of market
- The visible resting orders at each price level. Shallow depth is why a large order moves the price.
- Drawdown
- The fall from an account's high-water mark to its low point, expressed as a percentage.
E
- ECN
- A venue that matches client orders against liquidity providers directly, with the broker paid by commission rather than by spread.
- Equity
- Balance plus or minus the profit on open positions. This is the figure margin is measured against.
F
- Free margin
- Equity minus the margin already committed. What is left to open something new, or to absorb a loss.
H
- Hedging
- Holding offsetting positions to reduce exposure. It caps the loss and the gain alike, and still costs the spread.
K
- KYC
- Know Your Customer: the identity and source-of-funds checks a regulated broker must complete before you trade.
L
- Leverage
- The ratio between position size and the margin required for it. 1:500 means $200 controls $100,000.
- Limit order
- An instruction to trade at a stated price or better. It may never fill, but it never fills worse.
- Liquidity
- How much can be traded before the price moves. It is not constant: it thins at rollover and around releases.
- Long
- A position that profits if the price rises.
- Lot
- The standard unit of size. One standard lot is 100,000 units of the base currency; a micro lot is 1,000.
M
- Margin
- The deposit held against an open position. It is collateral, not a fee, and it is returned when you close.
- Margin call
- The warning issued when equity falls towards the margin requirement. Ignoring it leads to a stop out.
- Market maker
- A broker that quotes both sides itself and takes the other side of client trades.
- Market order
- An instruction to trade at whatever price is available now. It always fills, but not always where you expected.
N
- Negative balance protection
- A guarantee that a retail account cannot be driven below zero by a gap in the market.
O
- OCO
- One-cancels-the-other: two orders linked so that filling one removes the other.
P
- Pip
- The standard increment of a quote — 0.0001 on most pairs, 0.01 on those quoted in yen.
- Pipette
- A tenth of a pip, the fifth decimal on most pairs. Spreads are quoted to this precision.
Q
- Quote currency
- The second currency in a pair. It is the one the price and your profit are expressed in.
R
- Requote
- An offer of a different price after you clicked. It does not occur on straight-through execution.
- Rollover
- The 22:00 CET moment at which open positions are carried to the next value date and swap is applied.
S
- Segregated funds
- Client money held in bank accounts separate from the broker's own, and not usable as company capital.
- Short
- A position that profits if the price falls.
- Slippage
- The difference between the price you asked for and the price you got. It runs both ways, and we publish ours.
- Spread
- The gap between bid and ask. It is a cost, paid the moment you open, whatever happens next.
- Stop loss
- A resting order that closes a position once the price passes a level, capping the loss on it.
- Stop out
- The automatic closure of positions when equity falls below the required margin, at our margin level of 50%.
- Swap
- The interest debited or credited at rollover, set by the rate differential between the two currencies.
T
- Trailing stop
- A stop that follows the price at a fixed distance while the trade runs in your favour, and stays put when it does not.
V
- Volatility
- How much a price moves over a period. It sets what a sensible stop distance is, and what a position should be sized at.
No term matches that. Try a shorter word — the desk answers the rest on chat.
Funding
Open an account in minutes.
Identity check online, then fund by card, bank transfer or e-wallet. Most deposits clear in under ten minutes, and withdrawal requests placed before 14:00 CET are sent the same business day.
Segregated client funds · Negative balance protection on retail accounts
- Debit or credit cardinstant
- SEPA transfer1 business day
- International wire1 to 3 days
- E-walletinstant
- Withdrawalsprocessed within 24 h
Educational material only. Nothing on this page is investment advice, a recommendation, or an offer, and it takes no account of your objectives or circumstances. Leveraged products carry a high risk of losing money quickly. Figures, notes and schedules shown here are illustrative and belong to a demonstration site.