Library
The open encyclopedia of trading
Every concept a trader meets, explained once and explained properly — what it is, how it is built, how desks actually use it, and the conditions under which it stops working. 46 entries, no account, no paywall, no upsell in the middle of a definition.
Free forever · Written and reviewed in-house · Last revision 27 August 2026
Reference material should not be a lead magnet
Most trading definitions online are three sentences long, written to rank, and end in a signup form. Ours are written the way a desk would brief a new analyst: precise about the calculation, honest about the limits, and never selling you the indicator it just described.
What it is
A plain definition with the history attached, so you know what the term meant before the internet reshaped it.
How it works
The actual arithmetic or the exact structure on the chart, including the default settings and what changing them does.
How traders use it
The readings practitioners take from it in real conditions — regime filters, confirmation, execution context.
Where it breaks down
The failure modes, the statistics people misquote, and the conditions in which the idea stops describing anything.
Search every entry
Filter by section and by level, or type a word and watch the grid narrow. Search covers the term and its definition, so you can look something up by what it does when you cannot remember what it is called.
46 entries in the library
- IndicatorsBeginner
Relative Strength Index (RSI)
A bounded momentum oscillator that compares the size of recent gains with recent losses to describe how stretched a move has become.
Read entry - IndicatorsBeginner
MACD
A trend-following momentum indicator built from the distance between two exponential moving averages, with a signal line drawn on top of it.
Read entry - IndicatorsBeginner
Bollinger Bands
A volatility envelope that places bands a number of standard deviations either side of a moving average, widening and contracting with the market.
Read entry - IndicatorsBeginner
Moving Averages
Rolling averages of price that trade responsiveness for a cleaner reading of trend direction and act as dynamic reference levels.
Read entry - IndicatorsIntermediate
VWAP
The volume-weighted average price of a session, used as an execution benchmark by institutions and as an intraday bias line by traders.
Read entry - IndicatorsIntermediate
Average True Range (ATR)
A volatility measure that averages the true range of recent bars, giving a directionless estimate of how far an instrument typically travels.
Read entry - IndicatorsBeginner
Stochastic Oscillator
A range oscillator that shows where the current close sits within the high-low range of the last N bars.
Read entry - IndicatorsAdvanced
Ichimoku Cloud
A complete Japanese charting system whose five lines and forward-projected cloud describe trend, momentum and support in a single view.
Read entry - IndicatorsIntermediate
Fibonacci Retracement
Horizontal levels drawn at fixed ratios of a completed price swing to anticipate how deep a pullback might run.
Read entry - IndicatorsIntermediate
On-Balance Volume
A cumulative volume line that adds volume on up closes and subtracts it on down closes to show whether volume favours buyers or sellers.
Read entry - IndicatorsIntermediate
Average Directional Index (ADX)
Wilder's measure of trend strength on a 0-100 scale, read alongside the +DI and -DI lines that supply the direction it withholds.
Read entry - Chart PatternsBeginner
Head and Shoulders
A three-peak reversal formation with a lower shoulder either side of a higher head, confirmed only by a break of the neckline.
Read entry - Chart PatternsBeginner
Double Top
Two failed attempts at the same resistance level, confirmed when price closes below the trough between them.
Read entry - Chart PatternsIntermediate
Cup and Handle
A rounded consolidation followed by a shallow drifting pullback, with the breakout above the handle acting as the buy point.
Read entry - Chart PatternsBeginner
Ascending Triangle
A consolidation between flat resistance and a rising sequence of lows, resolving when one of the two boundaries gives way.
Read entry - Chart PatternsIntermediate
Falling Wedge
A contracting formation of lower highs and lower lows in which the lows fall more slowly, usually resolving upward.
Read entry - Chart PatternsBeginner
Bull Flag
A short, shallow consolidation after a sharp advance, marking a pause before the prior move often continues.
Read entry - CandlesticksBeginner
Doji
A candle whose open and close are effectively equal, marking a session that ended in balance rather than resolution.
Read entry - CandlesticksBeginner
Hammer
A candle with a long lower shadow and a small body near the high, appearing after a decline as a sign of rejected selling.
Read entry - CandlesticksBeginner
Engulfing Pattern
A two-candle reversal in which the second real body completely covers the first in the opposite direction.
Read entry - CandlesticksIntermediate
Morning Star
A three-candle bottoming sequence of heavy selling, a stalled small-bodied session, and a strong recovery candle.
Read entry - CandlesticksBeginner
Shooting Star
A candle with a long upper shadow after an advance, recording buyers who pushed higher and gave the entire gain back.
Read entry - Risk ManagementBeginner
Position Sizing
The rule that converts a risk budget and a stop distance into a quantity, and the single biggest influence on the shape of an equity curve.
Read entry - Risk ManagementBeginner
Risk-Reward Ratio
The ratio of a trade's potential gain to its defined loss, meaningful only alongside the win rate that ratio requires.
Read entry - Risk ManagementIntermediate
Maximum Drawdown
The largest peak-to-trough decline in an equity curve, and usually the constraint that decides whether a strategy is tradeable at all.
Read entry - Risk ManagementBeginner
Stop Loss
A predetermined exit that caps the loss on a position and makes the size of a mistake knowable before the trade is placed.
Read entry - Risk ManagementAdvanced
Kelly Criterion
The bet fraction that maximises long-run growth for a known edge, and the reason most professionals deliberately size well below it.
Read entry - Risk ManagementAdvanced
Value at Risk (VaR)
A loss threshold a portfolio is expected to stay within at a stated confidence level over a stated horizon.
Read entry - Market StructureBeginner
Support and Resistance
Price zones where prior activity has repeatedly halted advances or declines, used to define levels, targets and invalidation.
Read entry - Market StructureIntermediate
Order Blocks
A price-action concept marking the last opposing candle before an impulsive move as a zone of presumed institutional interest.
Read entry - Market StructureIntermediate
Liquidity Sweep
A push beyond an obvious high or low that triggers the orders resting there and then reverses back inside the range.
Read entry - Market StructureAdvanced
Market Profile
A way of charting a session as a distribution of activity by price, revealing where the market accepted and rejected value.
Read entry - Market StructureIntermediate
Fair Value Gap
A three-candle imbalance where price moved so quickly that a band of prices traded in only one direction.
Read entry - StrategiesIntermediate
Mean Reversion
A family of strategies betting that a stretched price will return toward a reference such as an average or a fitted spread.
Read entry - StrategiesIntermediate
Momentum Trading
Buying strength and avoiding weakness, based on the documented tendency for relative performance to persist over medium horizons.
Read entry - StrategiesAdvanced
Pairs Trading
A market-neutral strategy that trades the spread between two related instruments rather than the direction of either one.
Read entry - StrategiesBeginner
Breakout Trading
Entering as price clears a defined boundary, on the premise that compressed volatility tends to be followed by expansion.
Read entry - StrategiesAdvanced
Scalping
A very short-horizon style built on many small trades, tight spreads and execution quality rather than on a market view.
Read entry - OptionsAdvanced
Implied Volatility
The volatility figure that makes a pricing model reproduce an option's market price, read as the market's expectation of future movement.
Read entry - OptionsAdvanced
Delta Hedging
Neutralising the directional exposure of an option position by trading the underlying in proportion to delta.
Read entry - OptionsIntermediate
Covered Call
Holding shares while selling a call against them, exchanging upside beyond the strike for premium received today.
Read entry - OptionsAdvanced
Options Greeks
The set of sensitivities that translate an option position into exposures a desk can aggregate, hedge and monitor.
Read entry - MacroIntermediate
Yield Curve
The plot of government bond yields against maturity, whose shape encodes expectations for growth, inflation and policy.
Read entry - MacroBeginner
Consumer Price Index (CPI)
The monthly index of consumer prices whose surprises against consensus routinely move rates, currencies and equities together.
Read entry - MacroBeginner
Federal Funds Rate
The overnight rate US banks charge each other on reserves, targeted by the FOMC and anchoring the short end of the curve.
Read entry - MacroAdvanced
Quantitative Tightening
The reduction of a central bank balance sheet, mostly by letting maturing securities roll off rather than selling them outright.
Read entry
Six entries, in the order they build
If you are new, read these before anything else. Three teach you to describe what a chart is doing; three keep you solvent long enough for the first three to matter.
Every entry is educational reference, not investment advice. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything, and no technique described in the library produces a profit on its own — each one is a way of describing a market, which you still have to test.
Every concept here is one step from a backtest
Read the entry, then open the same idea on a chart. Most of what the library describes already exists as an indicator on the platform and as a function in AlgoBeamTS, so the distance between understanding a concept and measuring it on ten years of bars is a few minutes.
- Indicators11 entries
- Chart Patterns6 entries
- Candlesticks5 entries
- Risk Management6 entries
- Market Structure5 entries
- Strategies5 entries
- Options4 entries
- Macro4 entries
Ready when you are
Learn it, then prove it.
The library tells you how a concept behaves. The backtester tells you whether it behaved that way on your instrument, on your timeframe, over the last decade.
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