Weeks One & Two Study Guide

Class 1 is meant to be light. Nobody should be stressed on the first day. The point of this class was to get your community, your tools and your head in the right place before we ever touch a chart. Think of La'Kera as a cool friend walking you in, not a boogeyman. There is no such thing as a stupid question here.

Strip everything else away and trading is just two moves: buying something because you expect the value to go up, or selling something because you expect the value to go down. We buy if we expect the market to rise. We sell if we expect it to fall. That is the whole engine.

Buying is easy to picture. Buy a limited edition bag for ten thousand dollars, other people later pay fifteen thousand, you sell and pocket five thousand. Selling short is the one that trips people up, so use the borrowed handbag picture: you borrow an asset you do not own, sell it now at the high price, buy it back later at a lower price, return it, and keep the difference. You profited on the way down and you never owned the bag.

You will hear these compared to an athlete's week: the film room, the practice track, and race day. You never skip straight to race day. Athletes who do get hurt. In trading, getting hurt means blowing an account.

This felt early to a lot of people, and that is the point. It is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it. Watch the tax class before you set up NinjaTrader. The short version: an LLC taxed as an S-Corp lets you pay yourself a salary so you are not taxed twice. Trading as a business unlocks far more write-offs than trading as a personal entity. If you make good money late in the year with none of this in place, you hand a chunk of it back the following spring.

This was the calculator day. A futures contract is an agreement between two people to buy or sell something at a set price on a set date in the future. Picture booking a flight three months out at today's price. On the other side of every trade you take is another person, matched to you by a broker.

Futures were built for hedging, which is buying insurance against a price move. Six friends planning a Miami trip lock in six tickets at four hundred dollars each so a later spike to seven hundred cannot hurt them. A farmer locks in the price of wheat he will not harvest for three months. A physical product is really changing hands.

What we do is speculation. We predict the direction of price to profit from the rise or the fall, and we never want the actual barrels of oil or bushels of wheat. We take the cash difference and move on.

Because contracts expire, they roll over from one month to the next, for example September to December. We trade high liquidity assets, meaning thousands of traders buying and selling at once, so we can always get in and out. NQ is one of the most liquid contracts in the world.

The NASDAQ 100 (NQ) is a stock index tracking the 100 largest non-financial companies, heavily weighted toward tech like Apple, Nvidia and Amazon. You trade one chart instead of the individual stocks. Gold (GC) tracks the price of physical gold in dollars per troy ounce, and it is a universal commodity that does not care about the American economy. This was La'Kera's first cohort ever teaching gold alongside NASDAQ.

Leverage lets you control something big with something small, roughly one to four hundred. That cuts both ways: profits and losses are both amplified, so never trade full leverage. A whisper in the wrong direction can wipe out an over-leveraged account. Margin is the deposit the broker requires, like putting money down on an apartment instead of buying the building.

• Day margin is what you need to hold a position intraday. This is the number that matters to us.
• Initial margin is the much larger amount required to hold overnight. Always keep more than the day margin in your account, or the broker kicks you out.

The exchange behind these contracts is the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange), which runs NASDAQ, S&P 500, Russell and Dow. Gold trades on COMEX.

A chart is a visual representation of price over time, one axis price and one axis time. Charts turn raw numbers into a story we can read. The smallest unit of that story is the tick.

The math you will run before every trade:

1. Points moved = the price difference between two levels.
2. Ticks = points × 4 (on NASDAQ).
3. Dollars on NQ = ticks × $5, or points × $20. On MNQ, ticks × $0.50, or points × $2.
4. Max stop size in points = your dollar risk divided by the dollar value per point.

Example: enter at 19,490 and exit at 19,510. That is 20 points, which is 80 ticks, worth 400 dollars per NQ contract. And always ask which market when someone says they made so many ticks, because a tick is worth a different amount on every asset.

Every trade has three prices you define before you enter:

Tie it together with risk to reward: never risk more than you stand to gain. Risk one dollar to make at least one, ideally two or three. No strategy wins every time, so the goal is simply to make more money than you lose. A few winners cover the small losers.

The last day of week one, and the first time we really read the chart. Every candlestick is telling you a story, and it is a tug of war between buyers and sellers. The market is an auction, and it is an auction of who has the most money, meaning institutions, not retail. When price rises, buyers are beating sellers. When it falls, sellers are winning.

The body is the distance between the open and the close, so it shows the result of the fight. A large body means one side dominated, and the color tells you who. The wick shows a price that was reached but not held, a rejection. A long upper wick is an area buyers pushed to but could not hold. A long lower wick is an area sellers tested and got rejected from.

Rejection candles are named for the direction you should be thinking, not for what is being rejected. A bullish rejection candle has a long wick on the bottom and a small body up top: it rejected lower prices, so think buys. A bearish rejection candle has a long wick on top and a small body at the bottom: it rejected higher prices, so think sells.

A candle only matters at a key level, an area you have already decided is important. A hammer at a key level is a signal. A hammer in the middle of nowhere is noise. So before you trust any candle, ask three questions: where is it, which way is the trend, and what is the story. Shape tells you what happened, location tells you what it means.

• Shape over color. A wick on the bottom rejects lower prices whether the candle is pink or black. Understanding the sentiment matters more than the color.
• A candle is never concrete until it closes. It can flip from bullish to bearish before the close, so never act on an unfinished candle.
• To confirm a real rejection: the wick should ideally be about twice the body and clearly one sided, it must sit at a key level, the close should be convincing, and the next candle should agree.

Funding your account. You have two paths. A personal account means your money, your rules, your risk, and you keep all the profit. A prop firm gives you access to their capital: you pay a small fee, pass an evaluation by hitting a profit target without breaking rules, get funded, and keep roughly 80 to 90 percent of payouts. For your first couple of months a prop firm is often smart, because you discover your emotional leaks on a small evaluation fee rather than your own savings.

The Fear and Greed Index tells you what emotion is driving the market right now. Extreme fear tends to mean people are selling shares, so NASDAQ drops and gold rises. Greed pumps money into NASDAQ and lifts it. Neutral gives you nothing. And watch out for slippage, when the broker fills you a little off from your intended price, which can quietly make your stop bigger than you planned.

First class of week two. We finished timeframes from last week and moved straight into market structure, the first lens you look through before anything else.

A timeframe is the duration each candle on your chart represents. On a 1-minute chart every candle is one minute, on the daily every candle is a full day. A candle that took an hour to form holds more weight and commands more respect than one that took a minute, because it represents more real trading.

Think of the market as a city. A 1-hour or 4-hour candle is the zoomed out map, the big picture and direction. The 5-minute is the neighborhoods. The 1-minute is the streets. The 15-second is street view, every tiny detail. The city did not change, you just cannot see it when you are zoomed all the way in. Use higher timeframes for direction and lower timeframes for entries and exits.

Your style is really just which timeframes you live on. One of the biggest jobs early on is figuring out which trader you are, and you are never stuck, you can always pivot.

This feeds the top-down approach: start on a higher timeframe to find your key levels, drop to a middle timeframe to confirm bias, and go to your lowest timeframe to enter with precision. Start with the big picture, then drill down.

Market structure is the relationship among many candles, how price moves in waves to form trends over time. The market never moves in a straight line, it makes swing highs (peaks) and swing lows (dips). There are only three states, and no others.

Balance is an efficient market touching every level, back and forth, no clear winner, offering fair price to everyone. Imbalance is a sharp, impulsive move in one direction where price moves so fast that nobody could act on those skipped levels. The market often returns to those areas later to offer fair price.

That returning behavior is why a gap (a fair value gap) matters. It is a three-candle pattern: an untouched space is left between the wick of candle one and the wick of candle three, and the middle candle, usually a Marubozu, sets the direction. A bullish gap has a bullish middle candle, a bearish gap a bearish one. The gap is only valid once the third candle closes, and it is more reliable the higher the timeframe it forms on.

This is the heart of everything. Supply and demand is not a trading strategy, it is the underlying mechanic beneath every strategy. We also picked up the EMA as a quick trend filter and started putting concepts together in FX Replay.

Set an exponential moving average to length 20 with source OHLC/4 and it becomes a simple read on the trend. Candles above the EMA means uptrend. Candles below it means downtrend. The EMA tangled inside the candles means consolidation. Distance matters too: the farther the EMA sits from price, the stronger the trend. The closer it hugs the candles, the weaker.

Demand is how badly buyers want in. Supply is how many sellers want out. Picture your favorite store marking everything half off: the racks empty in an hour, and the next shipment comes in priced higher because demand was proven. Flip it, ten thousand unsold bags getting slashed again and again, and that is supply overwhelming demand. That is the market every single day.

Every zone is three candles. Candle one is the first reference point, candle two is the cause, candle three is the other reference point. The middle candle defines direction, the outer wicks define the size. A gap exists only when there is no connection between the wick of candle one and the wick of candle three. If the wicks overlap, there is no gap and no zone. The box edges are drawn to wick points, never to bodies, and candle three has to fully close before the zone is valid.

A wick through a zone does not invalidate it, only a body close does. And at all-time highs there are no supply zones, because price has never been that high before, so you only work with demand.

Size them with the Goldilocks principle: not too hot, not too cold. Do not draw microscopic zones, that is weak pressure. Big zones are allowed only if price taps and leaves. If price consolidates inside a big zone, no bueno, delete it. When a conflicting smaller zone forms inside a big one, delete the big one.

• No gap means no zone. Only draw gaps, defined by wicks and not bodies.
• Stay consistent on your entry timeframe, and judge invalidation on that same timeframe.
• Fresh zones get priority, but valid tested zones are fine.
• Only trade zones that align with your bigger picture. Counter-trend zones are lower probability and should not be held long.
• Delete every invalidated zone so you are not tempted to break your own rules.

This day was loaded and mostly not technical. We covered how to handle the news, how to stack confluences, how sessions and bias work, and finally the psychology that decides whether any of it matters. There is a full News masterclass and a Key Levels masterclass in the Day 6 folder to go deeper.

News creates volatility, causes gaps, and amplifies risk. Margins jump to about four times normal around scheduled events. The single most important principle: the market does not react to the news itself, it reacts to the difference between what happened and what was expected. A fully expected event barely moves price. A surprise moves it hard. So your two research questions are always: what is expected, and what would be a shocker.

How the two assets react. Gold is a safe haven, along with silver and Bitcoin, where money runs when it is scared. Gold moves opposite the dollar, loses appeal when rates rise (you give up yield to hold it), and gains when rates are cut or fear spikes. NASDAQ hates high rates, is stuffed with AI and chip names so it feels rate news first and hardest, and cares deeply about earnings, which gold ignores.

Your weekly research routine (about 45 minutes each Sunday, which becomes your newsroom plan): list every red-folder event with day, time and your plan; check current rates and expectations on CME FedWatch; note the one big story driving the week; check earnings for the seven giants; read the dollar, the 10-year yields and any flashpoints for gold; mark your key levels; and compile it all onto one page. Tools: Forex Factory, Financial Juice, CME FedWatch, CNBC, Bloomberg and Reuters.

A confluence is a reason to take a trade, and one reason by itself is thin. A demand zone plus bullish structure plus a clean reversal candle is three reasons, and stacking them raises your probability. Every concept in this cohort is another tool on your tool belt. You do not need every confluence on every trade, but the more you can check the more confident you can be. Just do not swing to the other extreme and wait for ten, or you will sit there all day.

A session is just the time of day you are trading, nothing you select. Volume is finite for a day, like a fixed number of eggs to spread across a basket, so a big session leaves less for the others.

Adjust your targets by session: a 100 to 200 tick target in New York might only be 50 ticks in Asia. Pick one consistent trading window that fits your life. Hers is 9:00 to 10:30, and if she sees nothing in that window she gets off.

Bias is a directional lean based on what the market has already shown you, not a prediction. It is a tool, not a commitment, so do not marry it. Two structured ways to build one:

• London bias uses the Asia range. Draw the Asia high and low. If London breaks below the Asia low, bias is bullish, target the Asia high. If London breaks above the Asia high, bias is bearish, target the Asia low. This only works when London is bigger than Asia. A wick can trigger the break.
• New York bias uses the London range. Draw the London high and low. Above the London high, expect a reversal down toward the London low. Below the London low, expect a reversal up toward the London high.

Price often reverses at the 50 percent of the range rather than reaching the far side, so mark that midpoint. And when the bias does not set up, and it will not every day, fall back on trend, supply and demand, and candle structure. Do not hold your breath for it.

Trading brings all the skeletons out of your closet. Most traders lose because of themselves, not the market. Risking more than you are comfortable losing puts you on tilt, which leads to revenge trades. The fixes are systems, not gear: keep your risk the same on every trade, scale up slowly only when a size stops bothering you, and build guardrails like a broker lockout after a set loss or a phone alarm that snaps you out of autopilot.

You now have a full tool belt. You set up your platforms and learned what buying and selling really are. You learned what a futures contract is and how to run the tick and point math on NASDAQ and gold. You learned to read a single candle, then to read many candles as market structure across timeframes. You learned that supply and demand is the mechanic underneath all of it, and finally how news, sessions, bias and psychology wrap around every trade.