Investing 101
Risk & trading system
The part of investing that decides whether you are still here in a year. Sizing, stops, expectancy, and the difference between a strategy and a system you can actually run.
38 guides · Beginner friendly
Cutting Losses and Sizing Positions: The Math Beginners Skip
The oldest trading book on most reading lists is a memoir, not a manual — but its two hard-won lessons are arithmetic, and the arithmetic has not changed since 1923.
Based on Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — Edwin Lefèvre
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The 2% Rule, and the Second Rule Nobody Copies
The 2% rule is quoted everywhere. The rule that makes it work is quoted almost nowhere, and without it a disciplined trader can still lose half an account in a single bad month.
Based on The New Trading for a Living — Alexander Elder
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Market, Limit and Stop Orders — The Three Buttons, in Plain English
The rest of this section keeps telling you to buy, to set a stop, to wait for a level. This is the guide about the buttons that actually do those things — and the single trade-off that separates all three of them.
Based on a clip by @RyanOConnellCFA — YouTube
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Where to Set a Stop Loss, and When to Move It
Most stop-loss advice gives you a number. This one gives you an example that contains a formula, and the formula is the useful part: your position size decides how much room your stop is allowed to have, long before your opinion about the chart does.
Based on a clip by @RichardMoglen — YouTube
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Trailing Stops: The Exit That Follows the Trade Up
A fixed stop protects the entry; a trailing stop follows the price up at a set distance and never moves down, so it protects profits without you watching. The mechanics are simple — the real decision is how wide to set the trail.
Based on a clip by @tracerouda — YouTube
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Averaging Down Works on an Index and Ruins You on a Single Stock
The same action, two completely different outcomes. An index quietly cuts its own losers every rebalance. A single stock has nobody doing that for it, and neither do you once you have decided not to sell.
Based on a clip by @FinancialWisdom — YouTube
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Leverage Changes Your Size, Not Your Risk
Pips, lot sizes and leverage in one page. The mechanics in the source video are correct; the reassurance at the end of it is not, and it is the sentence most likely to cost a beginner their account.
Based on a clip by @TheMovingAverage — YouTube
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Options Basics: Four Numbers Before You Buy One
An option is not a cheaper stock. It is a time-limited contract whose value depends on direction, distance, time and expected movement — and it can go to zero.
Based on a clip by @projectoption — YouTube
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How an Option Gets Its Price: A Probability Picture
An option's price is not a random guess or just the distance to the strike. It reflects possible future payoffs, their probabilities, time and the market's expected movement.
Based on a clip by @deltatrendtrading — TikTok
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Size by Volatility, Not by Conviction
Buying the same dollar amount of every position feels neutral. It isn't: it quietly puts several times more risk into the volatile names. Here is the fix, which is arithmetic rather than judgement.
Based on Systematic Trading — Robert Carver
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The Kelly Criterion: How Much to Bet When You Actually Have an Edge
A formula from 1956 that answers the question most beginners never ask: not what to buy, but what fraction of the account to put behind it. Including the reason almost nobody should use its full answer.
Based on Fortune's Formula — William Poundstone
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The $20-to-$52,000 Challenge, Run 1,000 Times
Thirty levels, 30% profit a level, 23% of the account risked on every trade. Simulated a thousand times it looks like a 99.5% success rate — until you change one number that you were never able to control anyway.
Based on a clip by @TRADINGRUSH — YouTube
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R-Multiples and Expectancy: The Only Two Numbers a Trading Record Needs
Stop counting your results in dollars. One unit of risk is 1R, every outcome is a multiple of it, and the average of those multiples is the only number that tells you whether a method works.
Based on Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom — Van K. Tharp
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Your Best Ideas Are Not the Problem
Forty-five investors were each given money to put into their single best ideas. Most of those ideas lost money. What separated the winners from the losers was entirely what they did next.
Based on The Art of Execution — Lee Freeman-Shor
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What the Market Wizards Actually Had in Common
Schwager interviewed the best traders he could find and expected to collect their secrets. What he got instead was a set of methods that flatly contradict each other, plus one habit that none of them was willing to bend.
Based on Market Wizards — Jack D. Schwager
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Twenty Trading Strategies in Twelve Minutes — How Many Are Actually Different?
A rapid-fire tour of about twenty tools, from Fibonacci retracements to moon phases. It is an excellent index and a terrible to-do list — because a third of the list is the same idea wearing different clothes, and the video never says so.
Based on a clip by @DataTraders — YouTube
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Risk–Reward Ratio for Beginners — A Better Entry Can Change the Whole Trade
The video gets the core asymmetry right: cap losses and let winners have room. The important correction is that risk-reward is only half the equation; win rate, costs and execution decide whether the combination works.
Based on a clip by @FinancialWisdom — YouTube
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Why Your Backtest Looks Better Than Your Account
Every rule can be made to look good on the data it was built from. Telling the difference between a discovery and a coincidence is a testing problem, and it has a known answer.
Based on Evidence-Based Technical Analysis — David Aronson
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Backtest a Trading Strategy Without Fooling Yourself
A backtest is a fast way to test a written rule, not a machine that turns a vague idea into a promise. The useful result comes from what you refuse to change after seeing the chart.
Based on a clip by @TradingLabOfficial — YouTube
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Setup, Strategy, System — Three Words, Three Scopes, and No Agreed Definition
Three words most material uses interchangeably, separated by scope rather than by quality. The useful part is not the definitions themselves — it is realising there is no standard, so the only safe move is to ask what someone means before you copy what they do.
Based on a clip by @ukspreadbetting — YouTube
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Trading System vs Strategy — Why Consistency Has to Come Before Profit
A definition most material gets wrong, and a reason to care about it: if your whole approach is one undivided strategy, then when it stops working you have no way to find out which part failed. Splitting it into fixed steps and variable methods turns a vague slump into a locatable fault.
Based on a clip by @Duomoinitiative — YouTube
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Does Your Trading System Fit You? — The Testable Half of a Trading-Psychology Video
The argument is that you keep breaking your own rules because the rules were built for somebody else. That is real, and the symptoms it lists are observable. What it gets wrong is treating fit as a substitute for edge — a system perfectly matched to your psychology can still have no expectancy at all.
Based on a clip by @StickTraderMind — YouTube
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The Turtle Trading Rules: What a Two-Week Course Actually Taught
In 1983 a commodities trader bet that he could teach a group of strangers to trade in two weeks. The rules were later published in full — and the part everyone copies is the part that mattered least.
Based on Way of the Turtle — Curtis Faith
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Trend Following: What a 22-Year Study Actually Shows
Trend following is not a high-win-rate trick. Its simple promise is narrower: accept many small losses while staying in the few moves that travel far enough to pay for them.
Based on a clip by @FinancialWisdom — YouTube
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The RSI-2 Dip-Buying System, Tested — and the Rule It Quietly Leaves Out
Buy S&P weakness only above the 200-day average, enter when a 2-period RSI drops below 10, exit when it crosses 70. An 18-year backtest shows high win rates and better ratios with scale-ins — and no stop loss anywhere in the rules.
Based on a clip by @TheTransparentTrader — YouTube
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What a Complete Trading System Actually Requires — Build It for Your Worst Day
The strongest idea in trading psychology, stated plainly: a system designed for the disciplined version of you is not a system, because that version is not the one who shows up most days. Five structural parts, one of which — the hard daily limit — is worth more than the other four combined.
Based on a clip by @thespiritualtraderr — YouTube
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Your First Trading Plan — Seven Sections, and the Two That Do the Work
The clearest beginner framing of a trading plan is that it is a written artefact you can hand to someone else. Seven sections, each one a decision made in advance — plus the test-then-refine loop that separates a plan from a wish.
Based on a clip by @_anthonysworld_ — YouTube
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Ten Rules From Thirteen Years — Seven Hold Up, Two Need a Condition, One Is Backwards
Start small, trade a tested setup, track results, don't over-trade, let winners run. Good rules, and one of them is stated with a number that turns your best trades into scratches.
Based on a clip by @DayTradingAddict — YouTube
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Six Day Trading Rules for Beginners — Which Ones Travel
Most of these rules work anywhere on day one. Two of them are true of US small caps and quietly change meaning somewhere else — and the strongest rule in the list is the one nobody quotes.
Based on a clip by @HumbledTraderOfficial — YouTube
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Three Swing Trading Rules — Wait for the Hard Trade, Then Follow the Trend
The best beginner takeaway is simple: trade with the longer trend, wait for a pullback to a meaningful level, and define risk before you enter. The market is not obliged to reward a clever story.
Based on a clip by @MoneyShow — YouTube
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Swing Trading vs Day Trading: Choose Fewer Decisions First
The TikTok says swing traders are much more likely to be profitable. The useful lesson is narrower: fewer decisions can reduce costs and emotional errors, but no style is automatically profitable.
Based on a clip by @moneyballaustin — TikTok
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Stop the Trader Spiral Before It Starts — Goals, Stops and a Daily Brake
The clip's strongest point is not motivation: an organised trader knows the loss limit and the stopping point before the first click. Without those brakes, a winning morning can become a losing night.
Based on a clip by @precisiontrader_ — TikTok
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The Hour Before the Open: A Routine You Can Copy Today
Most of what makes a trading day go well happens before the market opens and after it closes. Here is the routine, with the two steps that do the work marked out from the ones that just feel productive.
Based on a clip by @DayTradingAddict — YouTube
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How Many Markets Should You Actually Trade?
One market means you either wait or you invent a trade. But two correlated markets are one position at double the size, so the fix is not a longer watchlist — it is a less related one.
Based on a clip by @officialdanfx — TikTok
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Aim to Break Even Before You Aim to Profit
Set the first-year target to zero. A year that ends flat means you bought twelve months of real screen time for nothing — and you are still holding the account you will need later.
Based on a clip by @TheSecretMindset — YouTube
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A Trading Journal Records What Your Broker Cannot
Your broker already stores every price and every fill. The journal exists for the part nobody else records — why you pressed the button, and whether you would press it again.
Based on a clip by @TheTradingGeek — YouTube
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A Trading System Will Not Make You Money — What It Actually Does
The capstone of the risk and system track, argued across the five guides that come before it. Three definitions of the word that contradict each other, the three things that survive the disagreement, and the limit every source concedes near the end and nobody puts in the title.
Argued across 5 guides in this series
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Build a Break-and-Retest Trading System From Scratch
A beginner's break-and-retest system in plain English. Eight short sections, a source clip for every section, simple diagrams, and the rules that keep a clean chart idea from becoming a guessing game.
Based on a clip by @TheTradingGeek — YouTube
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Learning paths that use these guides
Build a trading system someone else could run
From three words most material uses interchangeably to a written document you could hand to a stranger. The test at the end is not profit — it is whether someone else could follow it and get your trades.
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Build a break-and-retest system you can actually test
One simple chart idea, turned into rules someone else could follow. Start by defining the system, finish with a testable record, and use short YouTube and TikTok lessons only where they clarify the next decision.
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Risk first: decide what you can lose before you think about winning
The half of trading that decides whether you are still here in a year, and it is one short chain: how much you may lose, where the loss is proved, how big that makes the position, and the two numbers that tell you afterwards whether any of it worked. Seven guides, about an hour, and every step is an output of the one before it.
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Reading about a system is not having one.
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