26 in-depth guides

Trading Strategy Types: Every Major Approach Explained

A trading strategy type is a family of rules that exploits one specific market behaviour. Learn how each family makes money, when it fails, and which markets suit it best.

Beginner guides

No prior knowledge assumed. Start here.

Strategies

Beginner5 min read

Buy the Dip: When It Works and When It Destroys Accounts

Buying dips works until the dip is the start of something else. The difference between a strategy and a habit is the trend filter and the stop.

Strategies

Beginner6 min read

Dollar Cost Averaging: What It Does and What It Does Not Do

Dollar cost averaging does not improve expected returns. It improves the probability that you will actually keep investing, which for most people matters more.

Strategies

Beginner6 min read

Position Trading Strategy: Holding for Weeks and Months

Position trading makes the fewest decisions and demands the most patience. It is the style most compatible with a full-time job and the least compatible with impatience.

Strategies

Beginner8 min read

Swing Trading Strategy: A Complete Guide for Working People

Swing trading holds positions for days to weeks and needs about twenty minutes a day. It is the most practical starting point for anyone with a job.

Strategies

Beginner7 min read

Trading Strategies Explained: Every Major Type and How It Works

Every trading strategy belongs to one of a small number of families. Learn what each family extracts from the market, when it works, and when it reliably fails.

Strategies

Beginner9 min read

Trend Following Strategy: Complete Guide With Rules and Examples

Trend following loses most of its trades and still makes money. This guide explains the mechanism, gives you a full rule set, and shows what the losing years feel like.

Intermediate guides

Assumes you know order types, charts, and basic risk sizing.

Strategies

Intermediate7 min read

Breakout Trading Strategy: Rules, Filters, and False Breakouts

Breakouts are simple to spot and hard to trade, because most of them fail. This guide covers the filters that separate the ones worth taking.

Strategies

Intermediate5 min read

Carry Trade Strategy: Getting Paid to Hold a Position

Carry earns money while nothing happens, and loses it all at once when something does. Understanding that shape is the whole strategy.

Strategies

Intermediate5 min read

Dual Momentum Strategy: Relative Plus Absolute Strength

Dual momentum picks the strongest asset, then checks it is rising at all. That second test is what turns a return chaser into a defensive strategy.

Strategies

Intermediate6 min read

Gap Trading Strategy: Fading and Following the Opening Gap

A gap is the market repricing while you could not trade. Whether to fade it or follow it depends on why it happened and what volume confirms.

Strategies

Intermediate5 min read

Martingale and Anti-Martingale: The Mathematics of Doubling Down

Martingale wins almost every time and loses everything once. This guide shows the arithmetic, then explains the inverted version that professionals actually use.

Strategies

Intermediate8 min read

Mean Reversion Strategy: How to Trade the Snap Back

Mean reversion wins most of its trades, which is exactly what makes it dangerous. Here is the mechanism, a full rule set, and the risk that must be capped.

Strategies

Intermediate7 min read

Momentum Trading Strategy: Buying Strength With Rules

Momentum is one of the most documented effects in finance and one of the easiest to implement badly. This guide covers the ranking, the rebalancing, and the crash risk.

Strategies

Intermediate6 min read

Range Trading Strategy: Buying Support and Selling Resistance

Markets spend most of their time going sideways. Range trading monetises that, provided you have a plan for the day the range ends.

Strategies

Intermediate5 min read

Seasonality Trading: Calendar Effects and How to Test Them

Some calendar effects come from real flows and constraints. Most come from testing enough combinations until something looks significant.

Strategies

Intermediate6 min read

Sector Rotation Strategy: Rotating Into Relative Strength

Sector rotation holds the strongest parts of the market and avoids the weakest, using a monthly rule. It is one of the simplest systematic strategies to run.

Strategies

Intermediate6 min read

The Turtle Trading System: Complete Rules and What They Teach

The Turtle experiment proved that trading could be taught as a rule set. The rules themselves are a masterclass in volatility-based position sizing.

Advanced guides

Assumes comfort with statistics, code, or derivatives.

Strategies

Advanced6 min read

Arbitrage Trading Strategies: What Is Real and What Is Marketing

True arbitrage is riskless profit from identical assets priced differently. Almost everything marketed as arbitrage is something else, and knowing the difference matters.

Strategies

Advanced8 min read

Day Trading Strategy: What Works, What Costs, and What Fails

Day trading removes overnight risk and replaces it with cost drag, competition, and decision fatigue. Here is what actually works and what it demands.

Strategies

Advanced6 min read

Event-Driven Trading: Strategies Around Scheduled Catalysts

Events create forced buyers and sellers. Event-driven strategies profit from that predictable flow rather than from predicting the event itself.

Strategies

Advanced6 min read

Grid Trading Strategy: How It Works and How It Fails

Grid trading produces a beautiful equity curve in ranging markets and catastrophic losses in trending ones. Here is the arithmetic behind both.

Strategies

Advanced6 min read

Market Making Strategy: Getting Paid to Provide Liquidity

Market making is a service business: you quote both sides and are paid for immediacy. The difficulty is not quoting, it is surviving the people who hit your quotes.

Strategies

Advanced5 min read

News Trading Strategy: What Still Works When Machines Read Faster

Humans cannot beat machines to a headline. News trading only works when the edge is interpretation, positioning, or persistence rather than speed.

Strategies

Advanced7 min read

Pairs Trading Strategy: Market Neutral Mean Reversion

Pairs trading bets that two related instruments will converge, not that the market will rise. Here is how to build, test, and risk-manage one properly.

Strategies

Advanced6 min read

Scalping Strategy: Trading the Smallest Moves

Scalping targets moves barely larger than the spread. That makes execution quality, not signal quality, the entire game.

Strategies

Advanced7 min read

Statistical Arbitrage: Trading Many Small Edges at Once

Statistical arbitrage replaces one confident trade with hundreds of weakly profitable ones, relying on diversification rather than conviction.

Every guide in this category

Other categories

Trading Foundations

Plain-English foundations for new traders: what a trading strategy is, how markets work, order types, timeframes, and how to build a first rule-based plan.

Indicators & Signals

How technical indicators are calculated, what they actually measure, and how to turn moving averages, RSI, MACD, ATR, and volume tools into tested trading rules.

Chart Patterns & Price Action

Candlestick patterns, classical chart patterns, support and resistance, and price action structure, each with objective definitions you can actually code and backtest.

Strategies by Asset Class

The strategies that actually fit each market: stocks, ETFs, options, futures, forex, crypto, commodities, bonds, and index products, with costs, hours, and leverage compared.

Risk & Money Management

Position sizing, stop losses, drawdown control, correlation risk, and the maths of ruin, explained so you can size trades with a formula instead of a feeling.

Algorithmic & Quant Trading

How to turn a discretionary idea into code: signal design, factor models, execution algorithms, data pipelines, machine learning pitfalls, and production monitoring.

Backtesting & Validation

Backtesting methodology that survives contact with live markets: look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, walk-forward analysis, Monte Carlo testing, and realistic cost modelling.

Market Mechanics & Execution

Order books, matching engines, order types, spreads, slippage, market makers, settlement, and the trading session structure that decides what your fill really costs.

Trading Psychology & Process

The behavioural side of trading: loss aversion, revenge trading, overconfidence, journaling, routine design, and the process controls that keep rules intact under stress.