Free guide

Crypto trading, from zero.

You watched someone trade for a living and thought: how does that actually work? This is the answer, in order, assuming you know nothing. It takes about ten minutes to read.

01 / What you’re actually doing

Two different things get called “crypto trading”

The first is buying the coin. You pay money, you own some bitcoin, and if the price goes up your bitcoin is worth more. This is called spot. It works like buying a share in a company, or a bar of gold. The most you can lose is what you put in.

Spot — buying the actual thing, at today’s price, with your own money. You own it until you sell it.

The second is betting on the price without owning anything. You open a position that says “I think this goes up” (long) or “I think this goes down” (short), and you make or lose money on the difference. In crypto, the usual version of this is a perpetual, which traders shorten to “perp”.

Perpetual (perp) — a bet on the price that never expires. You can hold it for a minute or a year. You never own the coin; you own a position, and you can bet on the price going down as easily as up.

Almost everything you saw in that video is the second kind. It is also where people lose money fastest, for reasons in the next section.

And a third thing, which this guide is not about

There is a whole other side of crypto that has nothing to do with charts: earning a yield on coins you hold, getting into new projects early, tokens handed out to people who used something before it was popular. People call it the on-chain or native side.

I do both, and the native side has at times paid better than trading for the risk taken — it is also far more arbitrary, and it is its own set of rabbit holes, each deep enough to lose a month in. Not for your first week. This guide stays with trading in the sense most people mean it: a price, a position, and a decision.

02 / What’s different from normal markets

Five things that catch everyone out

It never closes

Stock markets open in the morning and close in the afternoon, and they shut at the weekend. Crypto runs every hour of every day, including Christmas. Nothing waits for you to wake up, and the biggest moves have a habit of happening while you sleep.

Nothing stops a crash

Stock exchanges pause trading when a price falls too far, too fast. Crypto has no such brake. A price can fall 30% in an hour, and sometimes does. That is not a glitch; it is how the market is built.

You can borrow, and that’s how accounts die

Exchanges will let you control a position much bigger than your money. Put in $100, control $1,000: that is what “10x leverage” means. It multiplies what you make, and it multiplies what you lose in exactly the same way.

Liquidation — when the price moves against a borrowed position far enough that your money can no longer cover it, the exchange closes it for you and keeps what’s left. At 10x, a 10% move against you is enough. It is the single most common way beginners go to zero.

You pay rent on a position

With perps there is a small payment every few hours between the two sides of the market, called funding. When most people are betting up, the ups pay the downs, and vice versa. Hold a crowded position for a week and you can pay a real amount just for holding it. It is also a clue: when funding gets expensive, a lot of people are already on that side.

You can hold it yourself, and lose it yourself

Crypto can be held in a wallet only you control. No bank, no support line, no password reset. If you lose the recovery phrase, the money is gone permanently. That freedom is the point of crypto and the reason people lose everything to a phishing link.

03 / What that means for you

The practical version

Position size matters more than being right. Being right on a huge position and wrong once is worse than being right slowly.
Decide where you’re wrong before you enter. Price, not feeling. Then that decision is made while you’re calm.
Weekends are thinner. Fewer people trading means prices move further on less. Unpleasant surprises cluster there.
Leverage is not the beginner setting. Everything you see online is leveraged because it makes screenshots look exciting.
Money you need soon does not belong here. Rent money forces bad decisions, and the market can tell.

04 / Getting set up

Where to actually do this

You need an account somewhere that lists crypto. There are two kinds, and I use one of each.

A centralised exchange is a company. You sign up, prove who you are, and they hold your money, like a bank with a trading screen. An on-chain exchange has no signup form at all: you connect a wallet you control, and the exchange is code rather than a company.

KYC — “know your customer”, the ID check a regulated company has to run before you can trade. A photo of your passport or licence, usually a selfie, and normally a day or less.

Do you know crypto and trading?

Bybit

Start here

An app, basically. Sign up, pass the ID check, move money in from a bank or card, and buy. If you have never done this before, this is the shortest path from “money in an account” to “I own some bitcoin”, and it is where I would start anyone.

Open an account

Not available in the US. Code SLUX if the link drops it.

Hyperliquid

Where I do most of my trading. No signup form and no ID: you connect a wallet you control and move funds in yourself, and every trade settles on-chain where anyone can check it. The first hour is steeper, so it is the better second account rather than the first one — unless you already own crypto and have used a wallet.

Open an account

Also closed to US users. You’ll need a crypto wallet first.

Both links are mine, and I earn a share of the trading fees if you use them. Here is why that sits fine with me: most people in this corner of the internet push prop firms and offshore brokers that make money when you lose it, and take a cut of that. These two don’t work that way. They charge a fee per trade, the way an exchange should.

Six years in, I have used the prop firms and the other brokers. These are the two I actually trade on, each the best at a different thing. Prefer not to use my links? Go direct — the guide works either way.

Whichever you pick: buy a small amount of spot first, before you touch anything with leverage. Move money in, buy, sell, move money out. Doing that once teaches you more about how it works than a week of videos, and it costs you a few dollars in fees.

05 / Your first month

What I’d do if I were starting again

One coin. Bitcoin or ether. They move enough to learn on, and they don’t go to zero while you’re asleep.
An amount you’d shrug at losing. If the number makes you check your phone at dinner, it’s too big.
No leverage for the first month. None. You are learning where the buttons are, and buttons are expensive here.
Write down every trade. Why you entered, where you’d be wrong, what happened, and how you felt. That notebook is the actual product of your first year.
Expect to lose some of it. Tuition, not failure. The goal of month one is to still be here in month two.

06 / What to ignore

The things that look like trading and aren’t

Anyone promising a percentage per month. Nobody knows next month. People who say otherwise are selling access to saying it.

100x screenshots. You are seeing the one that worked. The same account has losses it never posted.

Copying someone’s trades with no idea why. It works until they stop posting, and then you’re where you started, only poorer and a year older.

Funded-account challenges, as a shortcut. Most of those firms make their money from the fees people pay to attempt them, and the rules are built around that. They are not a way to skip learning.

That’s the start. The rest comes by email.

I write up the trades I take, what I got wrong, and how this market actually works underneath. Leave an address and you’ll get it, and you’ll hear the day the Discord opens.

Sent only when there’s something worth sending.

This is education, not financial advice. I don’t manage money or tell anyone what to buy. Trading risks everything you put in, and leverage can lose it faster than you can react. Nothing here is a promise of any result.