Investing aims to grow capital over time while taking measured risk, usually on something that produces value: a company, a bond, a property. The horizon is years.

Speculating aims to take advantage of price moves over short horizons. It can also be done with measured risk and a written plan — but it doesn't live off the instrument producing anything, it lives off the price moving.

Gambling is risking money hoping for luck, with no method, no loss limit and no way to know whether what you're doing works or not. What separates it from speculating isn't the time frame or the instrument: it's whether there is a plan and a limit before you get in.

Confusing the three is the first mistake, and the most expensive one, because each of them needs a different mindset and different money.

In the glossary: Volatilidad

A broker is the middleman that gives you access to the market and executes your orders. It is neither a bank nor a neutral custodian: it is a company with its own business model, and that model defines how much trading costs you.

Two things change a lot from one broker to another: how much it charges (spread, commission, swap) and how it executes (the price you actually get filled at when the market moves fast). Two people with the same strategy and different brokers can end up with different results for that reason alone.

Who regulates it changes too. A broker regulated in a serious jurisdiction has obligations about segregating your money; one with no real regulation does not.

Heads up: Before you deposit anywhere, look up the broker's registration number on the website of the regulator it claims to be under. If it isn't there, it isn't regulated by them.

In the glossary: Spread · Swap

Leverage lets you move a position bigger than the money you have in your account: the broker lends you the rest. With 1:100 leverage, with 1,000 dollars you can move a 100,000 position.

What almost never gets explained properly is that leverage does not change how much you make or lose for every point the price moves — that is set by the position size. What it changes is how much position they LET you open with the capital you have.

The danger is not the leverage number itself: it is that high leverage lets you open positions so big that a normal market move wipes out your account.

Heads up: High leverage with no risk limit per trade is the fastest way to lose an entire account.

In the glossary: Apalancamiento · Margen · Lote

Margin is the part of your own capital that the broker locks up as collateral while you have a position open. It isn't a cost: you get it back when you close. But while it's locked up, you can't use it for anything else.

If your open positions go against you, your available capital drops. When it drops below a certain threshold, the broker warns you (a margin call) and, if it keeps dropping, closes your positions automatically so it isn't left exposed. That's called liquidation, and it happens at whatever price is there at that moment — not the one you wanted.

In other words: you can be right about the long-term direction and still be liquidated by a move along the way, if the position was too big for your capital.

In the glossary: Margen · Apalancamiento

Technical analysis studies how price behaves on the chart —what it did before, at which levels it reacted, how it is moving now— in order to make decisions. It doesn't ask why price moves: it deals with how it moves.

Fundamental analysis studies what sits behind the instrument: the economy, interest rates, employment and inflation data, a company's earnings. It asks what something should be worth, and why.

They are not opposing camps, even if the internet argues about them as if they were. Most people who trade use a combination: fundamentals to understand the context and which days are better spent not trading, technicals for the concrete entry and exit decisions.

Neither one predicts the future. Both are ways of organizing information so you can decide with something more than a hunch.

In the glossary: Volatilidad

Position size is measured in lots. What each price move is worth in real money depends on the lot and on the instrument: a point on gold is not the same thing as a pip on the euro-dollar.

This is the part beginners skip the most, and it's the one that turns an idea into an amount of money. "Price moved 20 points" means nothing on its own: it means something different depending on how much lot size you have open.

The risk calculator on the card next to this one does exactly that math: it turns your loss limit into a concrete position size.

In the glossary: Lote · Pip

The question "how much can I make here?" feels more interesting than "how much can I lose here?", and that is why most people start with the first one. The problem is that the profit does not depend on you and the loss does.

You cannot decide how much an instrument is going to rise. You can decide, exactly and in advance, how much you are willing to lose if you are wrong: by choosing where you put the stop and what position size you use.

Of everything that happens in a trade, that is practically the only variable under your control. That is why you define it first.

In the glossary: Stop loss

A widely used rule of thumb among people who trade with a plan is not to put more than 1% or 2% of total capital at stake on a single trade. At that proportion, a run of losses in a row hurts but doesn't destroy the account or your ability to keep going.

The logic behind it is simple: if you risk 2% per trade, ten losses in a row leave you around 18% down — recoverable. If you risk 20%, five losses in a row leave you with a third of the account (0.8⁵ ≈ 33%), and no strategy avoids five losses in a row at some point.

It isn't a magic rule or a number APEX is recommending to you: it's a commonly used reference. The number that works for you depends on your situation, and that decision is yours.

Heads up: The bigger the percentage you risk, the less room for error you have left to learn with. Mistakes are unavoidable at the start; what you get to choose is how much each one costs.

In the glossary: Drawdown

A stop loss is an order that closes your position automatically if price reaches a level you defined. It's the mechanism that turns a potentially unlimited loss into a known, bounded one.

The hard part isn't placing it: it's not moving it. When price gets close to the stop, the temptation shows up to push it "just a little further" to give it some room. At that moment you're changing the rule mid-game, and you've turned a loss you had accepted into a loss you no longer control.

Moving a stop against yourself once doesn't usually break an account. The habit of moving it does.

Heads up: Trading without a stop isn't "trading with more freedom": it's not knowing how much you can lose. If the market opens with a gap, the loss can be far bigger than anything you pictured.

In the glossary: Stop loss · Slippage

Position size is what connects your risk limit with the reality of the market. You calculate it the other way around from how most people do it: first you decide how much money you are willing to lose, then you look at how far away your stop is, and the size comes out of that.

Doing it backwards —picking a size "that feels right" and then seeing where the stop ends up— is what produces those trades where a single loss takes away a whole week's worth.

When the stop is further away, the size has to be smaller so that the maximum loss stays the same. That is the whole idea.

In the glossary: Lote

Drawdown is the fall from the highest point your account reached down to the lowest point after it. It's the honest measure of how much the worst stretch hurt.

Every strategy has drawdowns; there isn't one that goes up in a straight line. What separates someone with a plan from someone without one isn't avoiding them, it's having decided in advance how much they are willing to tolerate before stopping and reviewing.

There's a mathematical detail worth knowing: recovering from a drawdown costs more than the fall did. Losing 50% takes a 100% gain to get back to where you started. That's why limiting the fall matters more than speeding up the climb.

In the glossary: Drawdown

Beyond the per-trade limit, a lot of people who trade with a plan set a daily limit: a loss amount at which they close the platform and don't trade again that day.

The reason isn't mathematical, it's psychological. After two or three losses in a row, most people don't trade the same way: they trade faster, bigger and with less judgment, trying to win it back. The daily limit exists to get you out of the chair before that version of you makes the decisions.

Same with the streak: "after N losses in a row, I stop". It's a rule you write while you're calm precisely because it occurs to nobody in the heat of the moment.

In the glossary: Drawdown

An entry plan answers three things before you press the button: why I am getting in here, where I admit I was wrong, and where I take the profit if I am right. If any of the three is missing, there is no plan.

"It looks like it is going up" is not a reason: it is a feeling. A reason is a concrete, repeatable condition that you can write down and review later, yours and nobody else's.

The point of writing it down is not bureaucratic. It is that weeks later it lets you separate the trades that turned out badly from the ones that were badly decided — which are not the same thing.

R:R compares how much you risk against how much you're going for. If you risk 100 to go for 200, your R:R is 1:2.

What's interesting is how it combines with your win rate. At R:R 1:2 you don't need to be right most of the time for the numbers to add up; at R:R 1:0.5 you need to be right an awful lot. That's why looking at the win rate on its own, without the R:R next to it, tells you nothing.

A system with a 35% win rate can be perfectly healthy, and one with 70% can lose money. It depends entirely on the relative size of the winners and the losers.

In the glossary: Payoff (actual R:R) · Win rate · Expectancy / trade

Closing a winner before your target feels prudent — "locking in" the gain. But if your plan assumed an R:R of 1:2 and you systematically close at 1:0.7, your actual system is no longer the one you planned: it's a different one, with worse numbers.

The effect is silent because each individual early exit looks reasonable. It only shows up when you look at a hundred trades together and see that the winners are far smaller than the plan said.

The flip side is just as common: letting a loser run "to see if it comes back". That's where the R:R breaks on the other side.

Heads up: Cutting winners early and letting losers run is the most common combination in accounts that drain slowly, without a single dramatic mistake.

In the glossary: Payoff (actual R:R)

Moving the stop to your entry price once the trade has already moved in your favor removes the risk on that position: if it comes back, you get out with no loss.

It has a real cost, and it is worth knowing: the earlier you move it, the more trades get stopped out by normal price noise right before they would have reached the target. It is not free, it is a trade-off between peace of mind and how many trades make it to the destination.

Like everything else in this module, the useful decision is the one you make beforehand and write down: "I move to breakeven when the trade has advanced X". Deciding it in the moment is deciding it out of fear.

In the glossary: Stop loss

With eight or ten trades you can't conclude anything about a strategy. Any result in that sample —good or bad— is compatible with chance.

A common reference is not to draw conclusions below around 20 trades, and not to take them as final even then. Most of the certainties a beginner has about "what works for me" come from samples too small to mean anything.

This has an uncomfortable consequence: you're going to have to trade a method for a good while before you can judge it. Switching methods every five trades guarantees you never learn which one worked.

In the glossary: Minimum sample size (20 trades)

The spread is the difference between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at in the same instant. It's always there, on every instrument, and you pay it on every trade even if it never shows up as a "commission" line.

That's why every trade starts slightly negative: the moment you're in, you've already paid the spread. The shorter the timeframe you trade, the more this cost weighs in proportion to what you're trying to make.

The spread isn't fixed: it widens in moments of low liquidity and around important news.

In the glossary: Spread · Liquidez

Some brokers charge an explicit commission per trade on top of the spread — sometimes with a lower spread in exchange. Neither model is automatically better: you have to add up the total.

The swap is the cost (or, sometimes, the income) for holding a position open overnight. On positions held for several days it can turn into a significant cost that has nothing to do with whether you got the direction right.

If you trade intraday and close everything before the close, the swap does not affect you. If you leave positions open, it is worth knowing exactly how much they charge you.

In the glossary: Swap

Slippage is the difference between the price you expected to get in or out at and the price the order actually filled at. It happens when the market moves fast or there's little liquidity.

It can go in your favor or against you, but it matters especially on stops: in a sharp move, your stop can fill worse than where you set it, and the actual loss can end up bigger than the one you calculated.

It's one of the reasons trading around important economic data is more unpredictable than the chart suggests afterwards, once it has already happened.

Heads up: A stop limits the loss, but it doesn't guarantee it to the cent. In a price gap, the stop fills at the first available price.

In the glossary: Slippage · Liquidez

The gross result is what the price move says. The net is what's left after spread, commissions and swap. The difference between the two is proportional to how many times you trade.

It's perfectly possible to have a positive gross result and a negative net one. When that happens, the problem isn't the strategy or your read of the market: it's the frequency. You're trading to pay your broker.

It's one of the first things worth measuring, because it doesn't get fixed by improving your analysis — it gets fixed by trading fewer times.

In the glossary: Net P&L · Profit factor

Trading many times in a row, without a clear and distinct reason for each entry, is almost never a decision that comes from a plan. It is usually an emotional response: boredom, anxiety, or the need to win back what you lost.

It also has a double cost: every trade pays costs, and every trade taken without criteria makes your statistics worse. Which means overtrading charges you twice.

The sign is recognizable from the inside: if you open a position and you could not explain to another person why that one and why now, that is the moment to stop.

Heads up: If you notice you're trading "just because", one more trade doesn't fix the problem. Closing the platform does.

After a loss that hurt comes the urge to get in again, bigger, to recover fast. It's probably the behavior that has emptied the most accounts.

What makes it dangerous is that it feels rational in the moment: "the analysis was right, I just got unlucky". It may even be true — and even so, increasing your size after a loss is swapping your risk management for an emotional need.

The market doesn't know you lost and doesn't owe you anything. The next trade has exactly the same odds it would have had if the previous one had gone well.

In the glossary: Drawdown

Martingale means doubling your size after every loss, so that a single winning trade recovers everything before it. On paper it looks foolproof.

It fails for two reasons you can't get around. First, capital is finite: a losing streak longer than you expected leaves you with no money to keep doubling, and that streak always turns up at some point. Second, your broker has position-size and margin limits, so even if you had the money, they wouldn't let you.

When it fails, it doesn't fail partially: it takes the whole account at once. It's a method that produces many small gains and one single catastrophic loss.

Heads up: Any system that needs to increase size after a loss is betting that the losing streak runs out before your money does. There's no way to guarantee that.

Once you have formed an opinion about where something is heading, your brain starts giving more weight to the information that supports it and less to the information that contradicts it. It is not a personal flaw: it happens to everybody.

In practice it looks like this: you opened a position, it starts going against you, and suddenly you find plenty of reasons to hold it and none to close it. The reasons showed up after the position, not before.

The antidote that works is not "being objective" —nobody can do that at will—, it is having written the exit condition BEFORE getting in, when you still had nothing at stake.

They are two opposite fears and both do damage. Fear of losing makes you close winners too early and skip trades that did meet your plan. Fear of missing out makes you get in late, without your conditions, behind a move that already happened.

The second one is more expensive, because it usually arrives with big size attached: you get in rushed and with more than usual on top of that, right when the move is furthest along.

Noticing which of the two is running you at any given moment is already half the work.

Almost nobody breaks their rules because they don't know them. They break them because, at the moment of applying them, the rule costs something concrete and immediate —closing at a loss, not entering, stopping for the day— and the benefit is abstract and in the future.

That's why written, measured rules work better than mental ones: a mental rule renegotiates itself at the exact moment it's most uncomfortable, and on top of that it leaves no record afterwards that it ever existed.

That's exactly the problem the Discipline section of this app solves: you declare your rules while you're calm, and then it measures trade by trade which ones you followed. Not to scold you — so that you can see the pattern instead of remembering it wrong.

In the glossary: Your own rules vs. template

Trading with the rent money, the loan payment or the emergency money changes every one of your decisions, even if you think it does not. With that money at stake you cannot calmly accept a planned loss, and so stops get moved, positions get averaged down and trades that should have been closed get held.

The practical rule that gets repeated in all serious financial education is simple: only money you could lose in full without it changing your life.

It is not a motivational line. It is a technical condition for being able to execute a plan.

Heads up: If losing this money would hit your expenses for the month, the problem isn't your strategy. It's the money you're trading with.

Following someone else's signals can look like a shortcut, but it leaves out everything that makes a trade work: you don't know how much capital that person has, or how much they risk per trade, or when they're going to close, or why they got in.

Without that information you can't size your position, which is the decision that shapes your result the most. And when the trade goes against you, you have no criteria of your own to decide anything — only wait.

Beyond the financial risk, there's a more expensive one in the long run: copying doesn't teach you to decide, and at some point the source disappears.

Heads up: Be especially wary of anyone who shows results without showing losses, or who promises returns. Nobody can guarantee an outcome in a market.

Averaging down means adding to a position that's going against you, to bring down your average entry price. There are strategies that allow for it in a planned way, with limits defined in advance.

The problem is the improvised version: adding because the position is going badly and you don't want to accept the loss. There you're not executing a strategy, you're increasing your exposure exactly when price is proving your original idea wrong.

The typical outcome is turning a small, planned loss into a big, unplanned one.

Without a record, the only thing left of your trades is your memory — and memory stores things badly: it remembers the dramatic trades vividly and forgets the routine ones, which are the majority.

That makes it impossible to answer basic questions: do I lose more on one instrument than on another? Are my worst results concentrated on some day or some hour? Is my problem the entry or the exit?

None of those questions gets answered by looking at the chart. They get answered by looking at your own data, which is what the Performance Lab is for.

In the glossary: Live data / read-only

It's very common to spend months jumping from one method to another, looking for the one with no losses. It doesn't exist: every strategy loses part of the time, and that isn't a defect to be fixed but part of how this works.

The cost of jumping is double. You never build up the number of trades needed to know whether something worked, and each switch tends to come right after a bad run — meaning you systematically quit at the worst possible moment of each method.

Executing something simple consistently, and measuring it, teaches you more than trying ten different things and measuring none of them.

In the glossary: Minimum sample size (20 trades)