Trading Education on SteadyPips

Trading Guides

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Reference guides for traders who want to understand what they are doing before they automate it. These are the evergreen explainers we maintain and update — forex fundamentals, position sizing and risk control, technical analysis, grid trading, backtesting methodology, broker and platform mechanics, and step-by-step Expert Advisor setup for MetaTrader 4 and 5. Day-to-day market commentary and EA release notes live on the blog instead; come back here when you need the underlying concept rather than today’s chart.

Your EA's First Trade: A Pre-Flight and 30-Day Checklist for Going Live

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

From Installed to Trading

You’ve funded your account and installed the EA. This checklist covers the last mile: getting the EA correctly onto a live chart, what to write down before the first trade, and a dated schedule for the first 30 days with explicit points at which to stop and investigate.

If you haven’t worked through the basics yet, our forex trading for beginners roadmap covers pip value, position sizing, and demo testing before you get to this stage.

Forex Trading for Beginners: How to Start in 2026

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Is Forex Trading?

Forex (foreign exchange) trading is the buying and selling of currencies. When you exchange dollars for euros at the airport, you are participating in the forex market. The difference is that traders do this electronically, aiming to profit from changes in exchange rates.

The forex market is the largest financial market in the world, with over $7 trillion traded daily. It operates 24 hours a day, 5 days a week, across major financial centers in London, New York, Tokyo, and Sydney.

Types of Automated Trading Algorithms: Trend, Grid, Scalping, Mean Reversion

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Not All Automated Trading Algorithms Work the Same Way

If you’re new to automated trading, start with What Is an Expert Advisor? — it covers what an EA is, how it runs on your platform, and whether automation is profitable in general. This guide assumes that background and goes one level deeper: the different algorithm types EAs implement, and why the type matters more than the marketing around it.

“Automated trading” is not one strategy. A trend-following algorithm and a grid-trading algorithm can both be labeled “EA” while having almost opposite risk profiles, opposite behavior in a ranging market, and opposite capital requirements. Choosing between them — or combining them — is a bigger factor in your results than any single input parameter.

What is Forex Trading? A Complete Beginner's Guide

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What is Forex Trading?

Forex trading is the buying and selling of one currency against another. It is the largest financial market in the world, with roughly $7.5 trillion changing hands daily, as published by the Bank for International Settlements in its Triennial Central Bank Survey, October 2022.

That headline is where most beginner articles stop. This page is the mechanics instead: what you hold when a trade is open, what a pip is worth in dollars, what one round trip costs, and how leverage turns a modest adverse move into a closed account. For the orientation-level overview — brokers, routine, psychology — read forex trading for beginners first.

Understanding Forex Spreads and Commissions: A Trader's Guide

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Understanding Forex Spreads and Commissions

Every forex trade costs money before it has any chance of making money. The spread alone is the part most beginners learn about; it is one line in a longer cost stack, and the strategies that get hurt worst by that stack are exactly the ones — scalping, high-frequency EAs — that look best in a backtest that under-counts costs.

Cost is a recurring theme across our forex trading for beginners roadmap, and it is easy to underestimate until you see it added up.

Forex Lot Sizes Explained: Standard, Mini, and Micro Lots

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forex Lot Sizes Explained

Lot size is the one input that converts a price move into a dollar amount. Get it wrong and every other part of your plan — stop placement, risk percentage, reward-to-risk ratio — is describing a trade you are not actually taking.

This page assumes you already know what a pip and a lot are. If you are still working through the fundamentals, start with our forex trading for beginners roadmap, then come back here to get the sizing arithmetic right before you risk real money.

Technical Analysis Basics: Reading Charts for Beginners

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What Technical Analysis Can and Cannot Do

Technical analysis is a framework for defining risk and making repeatable decisions. It is not a prediction engine, and most of the disappointment in this field comes from being sold the second thing. This guide is part of our forex trading for beginners roadmap; for a full worked application of these ideas to one instrument, see our EUR/USD technical analysis method.

Here is the useful version of the claim. A price level identified from history gives you a place where your idea is demonstrably wrong. That gives you a stop. A stop gives you a distance in pips. A distance in pips gives you a position size. So a chart level, correctly used, is the input to an arithmetic chain that ends in a number of lots — not a forecast.

Forex Risk Management: Guide to Protecting Capital

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forex Risk Management: Protecting Your Capital

Risk management is the part of trading that is pure arithmetic, which makes it the part you can get right. This page works through it: what a drawdown costs to recover, how likely a bad streak is, how three sizing methods differ on the same trade, why three “separate” positions are often one bet, and how a stop loss fails. It is one module in the wider forex trading for beginners roadmap, and the one most worth reading twice.

Best Currency Pairs for Beginners: Start Trading These 5 Pairs

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Best Currency Pairs for Beginners

The usual advice — “trade the majors, avoid exotics” — is correct but too vague to act on. The real decision is a cost comparison: what you pay in spread relative to how far the pair typically moves in a day. A tight-looking spread on a pair that barely moves can still cost more of the available profit than a wider spread on a pair that moves a lot.

How to Open a Forex Demo Account and Start Practicing

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How to Open a Forex Demo Account

A demo account trades a live price feed with virtual money. It is genuinely useful for a narrow set of things: learning the platform, verifying that your rules produce the trades you expect, and forward-testing an Expert Advisor. It is also routinely oversold, so start with what it does not do.

This is the step our forex trading for beginners roadmap recommends before any live deposit.

How to Backtest a Forex EA: MT4 Strategy Tester Guide

Sun, 08 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How to Backtest a Forex EA

Backtesting runs an Expert Advisor’s rules against historical data before you commit money. The framing that matters: a backtest is good at rejecting strategies and bad at confirming them. A failing backtest is near-conclusive; a passing one is a hypothesis.

Running the Test

In MT4, Tools → History Center (F2), download 1 Minute (M1) for the symbol, then check the earliest bar you actually received: the tester builds every higher timeframe from M1, and if that history has holes it fills them silently and still prints a number. Then Ctrl+R:

Forex Trading Sessions Explained: Best Times to Trade Each Pair

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forex Trading Sessions Explained

The forex market runs 24/5, but it is really four regional sessions handing off to each other, not one continuous market with even conditions. Volatility, liquidity, and spreads shift with which financial centre is open — and, the part most guides skip, the GMT hours for each session move twice a year as different countries switch their clocks on different dates.

Session timing is one of the practical basics covered in our forex trading for beginners roadmap, alongside pair choice and position sizing.