How to Trade — Guides

Step-by-step asset guides

Each guide covers one instrument: what actually moves it, a concrete first practice trade with sizing, when during the day or week it is worth trading, the mistakes beginners repeatedly make with that specific instrument, and how to review the trade afterwards.

Available guides

• Bitcoin (crypto) — Bitcoin is a digital asset with a protocol-defined issuance schedule. Its market price is separate from that schedule and can change without a protocol change.
• Ethereum (crypto) — Ethereum is a network for running applications and smart contracts; ether, or ETH, is its native currency. People use ETH to pay network fees, transfer value and participate in staking. Trading ETH means exchanging that currency at a market price. TradeHQ lets you practise the price and quantity calculations with virtual funds; it does not send coins to a wallet or stake them.
• Tesla (stock) — Tesla is a listed company. A simulated TSLA holding represents a stock-price exercise and does not provide options exposure, voting rights or actual share ownership. Company results and delivery reports are different information sets.
• Nvidia (stock) — Nvidia supplies computing products and services. Its share price and its operating business are different objects: a change in sales does not translate mechanically into the same percentage stock return.
• S&P 500 ETF (etf) — SPY is an exchange-traded fund designed to track the S&P 500. An index methodology, a fund holding and a country economy are different things; broad coverage does not remove market losses or concentration.
• Solana (crypto) — Solana is a blockchain network and SOL is its native token. A TradeHQ holding is a simulated token-price exposure; it does not validate transactions or reproduce staking, network outages or token custody.

What every one of these guides has in common

The structure is deliberate. Beginners usually start with the question 'how do I buy this?', which is the least important part — placing the order takes seconds and any broker will show you how. The parts that decide whether the trade was sensible come before and after it: understanding what actually moves the instrument, choosing a size that survives being wrong, picking a time of day when liquidity is not working against you, and reviewing the result honestly afterwards.

So each guide spends most of its length on those parts. None of them tell you whether to buy, none contain price targets, and none imply that following the steps produces a profit. They aim to make your first practice trade in an instrument an informed one rather than a random one.

Using a guide properly

• Read the drivers section before looking at a chart, so the chart does not supply your opinion.
• Copy the suggested first practice trade exactly, including the sizing, before improvising.
• Note the timing guidance — trading an instrument outside its liquid window is a common and avoidable handicap.
• Come back to the review section a day after the trade closes, not while it is open.