Trading for beginners, in plain English.

The basics

What trading actually is

A market is a place where buyers and sellers meet. Every trade needs both: when you buy, someone sells to you; when you sell, someone buys from you. Price moves because, at that moment, one side wants to trade more urgently than the other.

A trader tries to buy before price goes up and sell before it goes down, over minutes or hours, and keeps every loss small and planned. Ches trades futures, mainly the Nasdaq 100 future (NQ): a contract that follows the Nasdaq 100 index, open almost around the clock on weekdays, and moved by the same rules of buyers and sellers as anything else.

Nobody knows what the next candle will do. A trading model does not predict; it tells you when the odds are worth a small, fixed risk, and, more often, when to do nothing.

Step by step

How to start trading without burning money

1. Learn the words first

   Liquidity, stop hunt, displacement, fair value gap. Five minutes with the glossary below saves months of confusion. The free trading flashcards drill them until they stick.

2. Pick one model, not ten

   Most beginners jump from indicator to indicator. One set of rules, followed every day, is something you can actually test and review. Lesson 1 teaches Ches’s one setup, start to finish.

3. Practise on charts before real money

   Open a free charting account, go back in time and mark the setup on old charts (backtesting), then watch it live without trading (forward testing). Do not trade at first: train your eye.

4. Fix your risk before you click

   Decide the most you can lose on one trade, the same every time (many traders use about 1% of the account), and put the stop in before you enter. A model with a good risk to reward can survive losing trades; random risk cannot.

5. Journal every trade

   Write down the setup, why you took it, how you felt and what happened. Your journal shows your real leaks. The free Trading Consistency Score finds the biggest one in eight taps.

6. Only then, a small live or evaluation account

   When your rules are written and your practice is reviewed, start small. Losing streaks happen to every trader; the plan is what keeps them small.

Putting the words together

How the MLSR setup uses them

1. The raid

   Price takes a prominent level: the previous day’s low, a session low, equal lows. No raid of prominent liquidity, no trade.

2. Displacement

   Price leaves the raid with force. No displacement means a fake sweep, so you skip.

3. The inversion entry

   A strong candle closes through a fair value gap. You enter on the highest time frame inversion, up to the 5-minute: the 5-minute first, then the 3-minute.

4. The stop

   At the bottom of the body of the candle that created the inversion. The same risk on every trade.

5. The target

   TP1 is a 1:1 at the next unfilled gap; any runner aims at the next prominent liquidity.

Only in two New York windows, 9:30 to 11:10 am and 1:00 to 3:00 pm, and never through high-impact news. All yes: take it. One no: stand down.

Later, not first

How prop firm evaluations work

Many traders try a prop firm evaluation instead of risking a large personal account. You pay a fee, trade a simulated account and must hit a profit target without breaking the rules: a daily loss limit, a maximum drawdown and, at some firms, a consistency rule that caps how much of the profit one day may make.

Evaluations are usually failed by breaking a rule, not by the model: one oversized trade, revenge trading after a loss, trading the news. The habits on this page (one model, a fixed small risk, two trading windows, a journal) are exactly the ones the rules reward. Read every firm’s own rules before you buy; they differ and they change.

Ches’s free prop firm guide compares drawdown types, consistency rules, payouts and fees.