Inside the TradingLounge · FX primer

Understand the
market move.

A practical guide to reading FX market structure: why price moves, how a candle tells its story, and how risk is defined before a trade idea is acted on.

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XAU / USDIndicative

4,627.17

▲ 0.32%

Live · London session

First principles

What is trading, really?

At its simplest, trading is an exchange: you give up one thing to receive another, at a price both sides agree on right now. A trader's job is to judge where that agreed price is likely to go next — and act before the rest of the market catches on.

Every trade has two sides. If EUR/USD is trading at 1.1670 and you believe it is heading higher, you buy now hoping to sell later at a higher price. Someone else, believing the opposite, sells to you. Neither of you needs to be "right" for the trade to happen — only for it to be profitable.

That's the whole engine. The rest of this page is about doing it on purpose instead of by accident.

You hold

USD

You want

XAU

A trade is nothing more than exchanging what you have for what you believe will be worth more.

Every position has a direction

Two sides of every trade

Going long

You buy first, expecting the price to rise, then sell later at the higher price. This is the direction most new traders think of by default — it's simply "buy low, sell high."

Going short

You sell first — often borrowing the asset to do so — expecting the price to fall, then buy it back later at a lower price to return what you borrowed. Same logic, reversed order.

The market's shorthand

Reading a single candle

Every candle on a chart is a tiny story about a fixed stretch of time — a minute, an hour, a day. Choose a label or tap the candle to see what it tells you.

Open

Where the period began.

The open is the first traded price for that candle’s timeframe. It gives the candle a starting point.

A real sequence

How a trade actually happens

Analyze

You form a view — using price charts, news, or a system of rules — about which direction an asset is likely to move next, and over what timeframe.

ii.

Place the order

You tell the market what you want: buy or sell, how much, and under what conditions. This is where order types — market, limit, stop — come in.

iii.

Manage the position

Once you're in, the job shifts to managing risk: deciding where you'll exit if you're right, and — just as important — if you're wrong.

Telling the market what you want

The three orders you'll use most

Immediate

Market order

Buy or sell right now, at whatever the current price is. Fast and certain to fill — but you don't control the exact price you get.

Conditional

Limit order

Buy or sell only if the price reaches a level you set. You control the price; you give up the certainty of an immediate fill.

Protective

Stop-loss order

Automatically closes your position if the price moves against you past a level you choose — the seatbelt of every trade.

Before you place a single trade

The risk side of the equation

Leverage cuts both ways

It lets you control a larger position with less capital — which magnifies gains and losses in equal measure.

The spread is a cost

The gap between the buy and sell price is a built-in cost of entering — it has to move in your favor just to break even.

Size your risk, not your hope

Deciding how much to risk before you enter matters more than being right about direction.

Position exposure at 10:1 leverage10× capital

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Understand themarket move.