Trading Lab 101 — Strategy Pathway
Trading Lab 101 walks learners through fifteen core trading strategies — from intraday price action to options, futures, Forex, arbitrage, dividend, value, and growth trading. This pathway page stitches those lessons into one coherent map so students can see how each strategy, scenario, and process summary connects into a larger system of market thinking.
Learners explore day trading as a same-day strategy focused on intraday price action, liquidity, volatility, and tight risk management. The informational text and scenario walk through a typical morning session and show how entries, exits, and stop-losses work together in fast markets.
The swing trading lesson shows how traders hold positions for several days to capture moves between support and resistance. The passage, scenario, and process summary emphasize pullbacks, risk-to-reward planning, and why patience matters when you sleep through part of each trade.
Position trading uses weeks, months, or even years as the time frame. Students see how traders combine higher-timeframe charts with basic fundamental clues to hold through noise and focus on major trend shifts, using wider stops and more deliberate entries.
Scalping focuses on seconds-to-minutes trades. The informational text explains order flow, tight spreads, and tick-by-tick movement. The scenario shows how a scalper stacks many small wins while controlling costs, slippage, and emotional over-trading.
This lesson explains how traders turn clear rules into computer code, test those rules on historical data, and then automate entries and exits in live markets. The scenario shows a simple moving-average system evolving through backtesting and refinement.
HFT runs at speeds no human can match, using co-located servers and microsecond decision-making to capture tiny price differences. The passage and scenario show how algorithms arbitrage a two-cent spread between exchanges and why this world is mostly institutional.
Momentum trading focuses on stocks that are already moving strongly. Students see how news, earnings, and volume surges create sharp trends, and how indicators like RSI or MACD help confirm strength. The scenario centers on a biotech breakthrough that triggers a momentum wave.
Trend traders care about higher highs and higher lows (or the reverse) over time. The lesson uses channels, moving averages, and trailing stops to show how traders enter on pullbacks and stay in trades as long as the trend structure remains intact.
Options give traders the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell at a set price. The passage introduces calls, puts, strike, expiration, and the Greeks. The scenario follows a trader using a call option before an earnings announcement to control risk and amplify reward.
Futures allow traders to control large quantities of commodities, indexes, or rates with a relatively small margin deposit. The scenario demonstrates how a $2 move in crude oil impacts a single contract and why margin calls and overnight risk must be respected.
The Forex lesson moves into the world of currency pairs like EUR/USD and USD/JPY. Learners see how pips, lot sizes, spreads, and leverage work together, and how economic news and central bank decisions move exchange rates around the clock.
Arbitrage focuses on buying and selling related assets at the same time when prices temporarily disagree. The scenario uses Bitcoin on two exchanges to illustrate market inefficiency, convergence, and why these opportunities tend to vanish quickly.
Dividend trading looks for steady cash payments from established companies. The passage and scenario walk through yield, payout ratio, ex-dividend dates, and DRIP plans, showing how reinvested dividends can quietly build large positions over time.
Value traders study financial statements, valuation ratios, and long-term cash flows to find companies the market has temporarily mispriced. The scenario shows a short-term panic creating an attractive entry, then resolving as fundamentals reassert themselves.
Growth trading targets companies expected to expand rapidly in revenue, users, or market share. The lesson uses innovation stories, forward-looking metrics, and a neural-processor breakthrough scenario to show how traders ride multi-year growth cycles — and when to exit as growth slows.