So — what exactly is trading?
At its core, trading is simple: you buy something hoping it goes up in price, then sell it for a profit. Or you sell something short, hoping it goes down, then buy it back cheaper.
That's it. Everything else — indicators, strategies, algorithms — is just a system for deciding when to do that.
Imagine you buy a used bike for €100 and sell it for €130. That's trading. You identified something undervalued, bought it, and sold it higher. Crypto works the same way — just faster and with a lot more charts.
How does a price actually move?
Prices don't move randomly. They move because of one thing: the balance between buyers and sellers.
they agree
More buyers than sellers → price goes up. More sellers than buyers → price goes down.
The current price is always the last price someone agreed to trade at. Every second, thousands of people are placing buy and sell orders — and the price adjusts to where demand meets supply.
You don't trade against "the market". You trade against other people — some are right, some are wrong. Your job is to have better information or a better system than they do.
Reading a price chart — what are those candles?
Open any trading platform and you'll see a chart full of colored bars. These are called candlesticks — and each one tells you exactly what happened to the price during a specific time period.
Each candle = one time period. On a 1-hour chart, each candle shows everything that happened in one hour — the opening price, the closing price, and how high or low it went in between.
If you see a green candle with a very long wick at the top — what does that mean? Buyers pushed the price up, but then sellers pushed it back down before the candle closed. That's a rejection signal.
What are you actually buying when you buy BTC?
When you buy Bitcoin, you're not buying a physical object. You're buying a unit of a digital asset on a decentralized network. The price is determined entirely by supply and demand — no company behind it, no earnings report, no dividends.
This is different from stocks (where you own a piece of a company) or forex (where you trade currencies). Crypto is pure market psychology + supply/demand + narrative — which makes it both highly volatile and full of trading opportunities.
How a trade works — step by step
Timeframes — the same market, different views
Every chart has a timeframe — how long each candle represents. The same coin looks completely different on a 1-minute chart vs. a daily chart. Choosing the right timeframe depends on your trading style.
Switching between timeframes constantly — "1m says BUY but 1d says SELL — which one do I follow?" Pick one timeframe for your entries and stick with it. Use higher timeframes only for context.
Key terms you'll see everywhere
Trading = buying and selling to profit from price moves. Prices move based on buyer/seller balance. Candlesticks show you open, close, high, low for a time period. Green = buyers won. Red = sellers won. Timeframe = how long each candle is. Start with 1h–4h.