How to Learn Trading from Scratch: What to Study and in What Order

How long does it take to learn trading?

The honest answer: longer than the ads promise. You can learn the terms in a couple of weeks. Learning to see them on a live chart and to stop breaking your own rules takes months. In our experience, it takes six months to a year of daily practice to stop getting lost in market structure and start following your plan consistently.

For reference, here are the channel author's numbers for 2025 (as of mid-December), shared in his year in review (post in Russian): 293 days at the chart and 8,484 market simulator sessions for backtesting, testing instruments and learning. That's almost 29 sessions a day on average. There's no secret behind it, just repetition.

Trading carries a real risk of losing money. If you need guaranteed profit by a certain date, this path isn't for you: the market owes you nothing, and even experienced traders go through losing streaks.

Where do you start learning trading from scratch?

Before you study any concepts, set up your workspace and narrow your focus:

• Platform. Free TradingView is enough to mark up charts and backtest manually in Replay mode.
• One instrument. We start with the GER40 (DAX) index: it respects zones cleanly and has clear sessions. Add NAS100 and JP225 later.
• Demo account. The first few months, demo or simulator only. Real money comes once you have statistics on at least 50–100 trades.
• Notebook or spreadsheet. You need a trading journal from day one, even on demo.

Don't buy indicators or "secret" strategies. Everything below is built by hand on a clean chart.

Which instrument should you learn on?

Smart Money concepts work on any liquid market, but every instrument has its own character. Here's how we see them after hundreds of trades in the journal:

For beginners we recommend one index and one or two sessions. Once the rules become habit, adding a second instrument takes a couple of weeks: the concepts are the same.

What are ICT and Smart Money in simple terms?

ICT (Inner Circle Trader) and Smart Money Concepts are a way of reading the chart by asking "where is the money right now?" A large player needs opposing orders to build a position, and the biggest pools of them sit where everyone else's stops are: above highs and below lows. That's why price often takes liquidity first and only then moves in its "real" direction.

The second pillar is inefficiency. When price moves through an area too fast, it leaves a fair value gap (FVG) on the chart, and the market tends to come back to it. All the other terminology (OTE, BISI/SIBI, SMT, killzones) narrows down when and where to look for an entry between those two poles.

Keep in mind: ICT isn't a ready-made strategy with a "buy" button. It's a language. Every trader uses it to put together their own trading system, and ours is just one of many possible.

What order should you learn in? Nine steps

Order matters more than speed. Each step builds on the previous one, so don't skip ahead: OTE without an understanding of structure turns into drawing Fibonacci at random.

1. Market structure

Start with the basics: where's the high, where's the low, did it get taken out? Bullish structure is a series of higher highs and higher lows; bearish is the opposite. A break of the last significant swing in the direction of the trend is a BOS; a reversal of structure is an MS (market structure shift). In our reports this reads as "3m bos" or "15m ms": a break of structure on the 3- or 15-minute chart that confirms the higher-timeframe idea.

2. Liquidity

As soon as you can see swings, ask yourself: where are the stops of the people who traded that swing? Buyside liquidity (BSL) rests above highs, sellside liquidity (SSL) below lows. We also single out PDH and PDL, the previous day's high and low, plus session highs and lows. More in Liquidity in Trading.

3. Fair value gap (FVG)

A fair value gap is a three-candle area where the wicks of the first and third candles don't overlap. It's the main zone of interest in our trading: almost every report in the channel starts with something like "test bisi 4h" or "test sibi 1h". Study the fair value gap (FVG) and its directional versions, BISI and SIBI.

4. OTE

OTE is the 0.62–0.79 Fibonacci retracement zone within an impulse. It answers the question "where exactly in the zone do I enter?" In practice we often work from the 0.5 level, the middle of the range, especially when it lines up with a fair value gap.

5. Sessions and killzones

The market doesn't move evenly. For GER40 the key moments are the Frankfurt and London opens; for NAS100, New York. The Asian session often sets a range that gets taken out later. Record the session of every entry in your journal: in a couple of months you'll see which hours give you the best results.

6. Market Profile

Market Profile shows where the market spent the most time: the Value Area, the POC, the Initial Balance. We build the profile on DAX futures and execute on GER40. The day's open type, read from the profile, is one of our main filters: it hints whether the day will trend or rotate.

7. Risk management

This step comes seventh only because without understanding a structural stop, there's nothing to apply it to. In terms of importance, it's first. Risk 0.5–1% per trade, and size the position from the distance to the stop. A GER40 example is in Risk Management in Trading.

8. Trading journal

No journal, no statistics; no statistics, no system, just a collection of impressions. Which columns to keep and how to run a weekly review is covered in The Trader's Trading Journal.

9. Psychology

Psychology isn't a separate subject you can "finish." It's the skill of following your plan after three stops in a row and not overstaying a winning trade out of greed. The best medicine is small risk and a journal: when a stop costs 0.5% of the account, it's easier to accept.

How do you practice so knowledge becomes skill?

Reading about a fair value gap and spotting one in real time are two different things. Between steps you need practice in three stages.

1. Manual backtest. Open Replay in TradingView, pick one setup (for example, a 1h BISI test with 3m confirmation) and run through 30–50 trading days of history. Log every trade in your journal as if it were real: entry, stop, target, result in R.
2. Forward test on demo. Same rules, but in real time. This is where things show up that a backtest doesn't have: waiting, doubt, the urge to get in early.
3. Review. Once a week, go through every trade and compare it with your rules. Separate trades that broke the rules from trades that followed the rules and still lost: those are different problems.

Breakdowns of other people's trades, ours included, are useful as an example of the reasoning. But the only statistics you can rely on are your own.

How do you know you're ready for a live account?

Readiness isn't a feeling; it's a set of conditions you can check. Here's the minimum we suggest:

• your entry, stop and target rules are written down and fit on one page;
• your journal has at least 50 trades under those rules, backtest plus demo;
• over the sample the result is positive in R, not just in your best week;
• you know your maximum risk per trade and per day in advance and have never broken it on demo;
• a streak of five stops in a row doesn't make you change the system.

If even one item isn't met, keep going on demo. The market isn't going anywhere.

Prop firm or your own account?

Many students start trading real money through a prop firm: you pay for a challenge, pass an evaluation under drawdown rules and get a funded account. The upside is a capped loss: at most you lose the challenge fee. The downside is strict daily and overall drawdown limits that punish any oversized risk.

The good news: prop firm rules are almost the same as sound risk management. If you risk 0.5–1% per trade and keep a journal, the limits won't stop you. If you don't, a prop challenge will show it quickly, and more cheaply than your own account would.

What abbreviations show up in our trade breakdowns?

Trade reports in the channel and on the server are written in shorthand. Here's a glossary you'll need from day one:

Do you need a paid trading course?

Not necessarily. Nearly every concept in this plan is covered in open sources, including our own learning section. A paid course doesn't buy you information; it buys three things: structure (what to learn now and what later), feedback (someone reviews your specific mistakes) and an environment (people around you trade every day and don't let you quit).

If you're choosing a course or community, ask three questions. Does the author show their stops, not just their wins? Do they have a public trade history going back a year or more? Do they promise income? If the answer to the first two is "no" and to the third is "yes," keep looking.

What does a trading day look like with this approach?

All the steps add up to one sequence. In the morning we set the direction from the higher timeframe (HTF bias) and mark the zones: 4h and 1h fair value gaps, liquidity, the value area from the profile. Then we wait for price to reach a zone during the right session and look for confirmation on the lower timeframe: a break of structure on the 3m or 15m. The stop goes beyond the point where the idea is invalidated; the size comes from the stop.

Trade from the channel

GER40 / DAX TRADINGVIEW ↗

Note why we closed early: SMT divergence with EU50. It's a trade-management tool, not an entry tool. More in SMT Divergence.

What do you do when a trade doesn't work?

Stops are part of the job, and we publish them just like wins. We review every stop with one question: was the entry by the rules? If yes, that's normal statistics. If not, the specific mistake goes into the journal.

Trade from the channel

GER40 TRADINGVIEW ↗

Common mistakes when learning to trade

• Learning everything at once. Ten concepts in a week leave you with mush. One step means at least two or three weeks of practice on the chart.
• Trading real money before you have statistics. First 50–100 trades on demo or in a backtest under the same rules.
• Changing the system after every stop. A streak of 3–5 losing trades is normal even for a working system. Judge it over a large sample.
• Chasing a daily percentage. A "5% a day" goal pushes you to oversize your risk. We covered this in a separate post (in Russian): a realistic benchmark is a few percent a month with 0.5–1% daily risk.
• Trading without a journal. Without records you'll never know which setup and which session make you money and which ones take it away.
• Copying other people's trades. Someone else's entry without the context is a lottery ticket. Breakdowns are for learning the reasoning, not for repeating button clicks.

How we learn and teach at Fix Pips

Fix Pips is an open journal of the author's real trades on GER40, NAS100 and JP225, with charts and honest stops. Every article in this section is built on those trades: the journal examples aren't illustrations of "how it could have gone"; they're what actually happened on the account.

If you want to learn in an environment where the day's plan is broken down every morning, and what worked and what didn't after the session, check out our private Discord server. It's not signals and not a promise of income: people there learn to build their own system and review mistakes, ours included.

Start with the first step. If market structure already makes sense to you, move on to liquidity.