How to Learn Trading: The Order to Learn It
To learn trading, study in this order: orders and costs, position size arithmetic, reading a bare chart, one written method, then 100 logged practice trades. Move to the next stage only when the current one meets a pass mark you can check, and leave indicators and patterns until after the fifth stage.
Most people learn trading in the order the material is offered, which puts indicators and patterns first and position size somewhere near the end. This page is the reverse order, with a checkable pass mark for each stage so you know when to move on.
Before you start
A free charting account with a replay or history view. Stage three needs charts you can mark without seeing what happened next, and every major platform offers a free tier that does this.
A notebook or spreadsheet for every practice trade. Stage five is 100 trades, and a trade that was not written down before its outcome does not count.
About an hour a day for several months, planned in advance. The stages are short to describe and slow to complete. Deciding the time now stops the plan from depending on motivation later.
Nothing here needs a paid course, a signal service or a funded account. This page is about the order of learning; how to start trading covers opening the first small account once the learning is done.
The steps
1. Learn how orders fill and what a round trip costs
Market, limit and stop orders, and what each one guarantees and does not. Then the cost of one round trip on the market you will trade: spread plus commission, in dollars. The order types page covers the mechanics.
2. Learn position size before any chart
Money you will risk, divided by the distance to the price where the idea is wrong. That is the whole formula, and how to calculate position size works it through. Practice it by hand until it is automatic.
3. Learn to read a bare chart without indicators
Candles, then trend versus range, then the levels where price has turned before. Mark them on historical charts with the right-hand side hidden, then reveal it. Chart reading covers the four things to look for.
4. Write one method in three lines
Where you get in, where the idea is wrong, where you get out — one line each. It has to be written so that another person could follow it without asking you anything.
5. Take 100 practice trades with the method, then review them
Test it on history first, per how to backtest a strategy, then forward on a simulated account, per how to paper trade properly. Log each one with its reason before the outcome, and review them only after the hundredth.
How to tell it worked
Each stage has a pass mark, and you move on only when it is met.
Stage one: you can state the cost of one round trip on your market in dollars, without looking it up.
Stage two: 10 practice trades sized by hand with 0 errors, checked against a calculator afterwards.
Stage three: trend and levels marked on 20 charts before scrolling ahead, then compared with what happened. The aim is consistency in how you mark them, not predicting the outcome.
Stage four: a method with no judgment words in it. “Strong”, “clean” and “looks like” are the ones to remove.
Stage five: 100 trades logged, each with its reason written before the outcome. A trading journal is the record this produces.
Why this order
Costs and size decide outcomes before any read is made. A good read sized too large still ends an account; a round trip that eats most of a small target makes even a correct method lose. Neither needs a chart, so neither should wait for one.
The bare chart comes before indicators because indicators are formulas of it. A moving average or an oscillator summarizes the bars. Without being able to say whether a market is trending or ranging, there is no way to know whether an indicator is in the conditions it was designed for.
One method comes before many because a record needs a fixed rule. A hundred trades across five methods are five records of twenty, and twenty trades cannot separate a working rule from luck.
And indicators, patterns and sessions come last because they are refinements. The right place for them is as a filter tested against the record from stage five.
The original data
47 of the 24,971 videos in the search study behind this site have learn trading, learn to trade or learn how to trade in the title, at a median of 38,551 views across 42 channels. They run a median of 14.2 minutes.
The rest of the corpus shows what most study material covers. 1,937 titles carry indicator, at a median of 8,753 views. Position size or position sizing appears in 195 titles, at a median of 1,738. Risk management appears in 410 and backtest or backtesting in 462.
About ten indicator videos for every one on position size. The material most people learn from is weighted heavily toward what this page leaves until after stage five, and lightly toward stage two, the one that decides whether an account survives long enough for anything else to matter.
When it fails
The first failure is moving on because a stage feels familiar. Position sizing is easy to understand and easy to get wrong under pressure. A trader who read the formula once and never hit 0 errors on 10 drills will size the first real trade by feel, which is the exact habit stage two exists to remove.
The second is skipping straight to indicators. Adding indicators before stage five produces a chart full of signals and no record to judge them against.
The third is changing the method during the 100 trades. Each change restarts the count.
The fourth is marking charts with the answer visible. Hindsight makes every level look obvious.
And the fifth is treating 100 practice trades as proof. They show whether the rule is followed and roughly how it behaves; they do not show what live fills and nerves will do.
Related
How to start trading covers the move from practice to a first small account. How to paper trade properly sets the rules that make stage five count. And how to backtest a strategy is the history half of that stage.
Treat the pass marks as the syllabus. A stage that feels familiar is not finished; a stage where you can hit the number without looking anything up is.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.