Basics · start here
Read the chart before you read the patterns.
12 short lessons for people starting out. Each one explains a single idea, with an illustrative chart where it helps and three questions at the end. Read them in order, or jump to what you need.
Reading a chart
Everything the pattern lessons assume you know: candles, trends, levels, volume and timeframes.
- How to read a candlestickEach candle shows four prices for one period. The body and wicks show who pushed price where, and who won by the close.
- Trends: higher highs and higher lowsAn uptrend is a staircase of higher highs and higher lows. The trend is in doubt when that sequence breaks.
- Support and resistanceLevels where price has turned before, because orders and memory cluster there. Broken resistance often becomes support.
- Trendlines and channelsA trendline connects the swing lows of an uptrend, or the highs of a downtrend. Two touches draw it; a third confirms it.
- Volume: the weight behind a moveVolume shows how much traded in each period. It tells you how many people stood behind a move.
- Timeframes: same market, different zoomA timeframe is how much time each candle covers. Zooming out filters noise; zooming in shows detail and more false signals.
- Breakouts, retests and fakeoutsA breakout is a close beyond a level, and many fail. The close, the volume and what happens next tell them apart.
How crypto works
What you are actually looking at when you look at a crypto chart: the network, the keys, the supply and the market.
- What a blockchain actually isA shared record that thousands of computers keep in sync. Its value is that no single party can quietly rewrite it.
- Wallets, keys and seed phrasesA wallet doesn't hold coins; it holds the keys that move them. Whoever has the keys, or the seed phrase, controls the funds.
- Price, market cap and supplyPrice means little without supply. Market cap is price times circulating supply, and supply can grow.
- Stablecoins: how they hold a peg, and how they lose itTokens designed to track a currency, usually the US dollar. How well they hold depends on what backs them.
- How an exchange order book worksEvery exchange price comes from a list of waiting buy and sell orders. How deep that list is decides what you actually pay.
After the basics
Put it together in the pattern library.
Every pattern lesson uses these ideas: the trend before it, the levels it forms, the volume behind the break.