How a paper is written.

One skill per paper

Each paper teaches one thing you can do. The test is a sentence you could say at the end: “I can now …”. If the only honest ending is “I now understand”, the paper is information rather than a skill, and it is written again. A subject too big for one paper becomes two.

The title says what is inside

“What Is MACD.” “How to Calculate Position Size.” You should know what a paper covers before you open it, and the title is what you would type into a search box — so it states the subject plainly, never as a clever phrase. The subtitle adds the detail.

Plain words

Every term is explained the first time it appears, in the same sentence, in words someone who has never traded would follow. The everyday word wins over the industry word. Sentences are short, each paragraph holds one idea, and no paper assumes you have read another.

Six to twelve pages

Long enough to teach the skill properly, short enough to finish in one sitting. Most papers are eight pages. A paper that needs more than twelve is two papers.

A picture for every paragraph

Each paragraph comes with the picture that makes it clear, and the paragraph explains what you are already looking at.

Anything about what a price did is shown on a real chart, drawn from recorded price bars and captioned with the instrument, the timeframe and the date, so you can put the paper beside your own platform and find the same bars. The example is searched for in the data, never picked to make a point look better than it is; if the honest example includes a failure, the failure is shown. Everything else is a drawing made for that one paper — no drawing appears in two papers.

A chart only where the subject is on a chart

A candle, a level or a trading session belongs on a price chart. Leverage, margin, a lot or the spread do not, so those papers show how the thing works in one worked trade with real numbers instead.

What a paper never does

It never tells you where to buy, sell or place a stop. It never promises how often something works or quotes a success rate. It explains what a thing is, what it looks like and how it works — the decision stays yours.

Checks before publishing

Before a paper is built, automatic checks test it against these rules: the title, the length, a picture beside every paragraph, a date under every chart, no drawing repeated from another paper, and a style check that catches filler and hedging. A paper that fails is not published.

Corrections

If a paper says something you can show is wrong, write to us. We correct the paper and publish the corrected version.