Systematic Trading Foundations

What this is

A documentation-style learning platform that takes one learner from trading beginner to competent systematic operator, built from free material — the best YouTube teaching embedded, gaps filled with original written explainers — organized into levels with exercises, code, and completion tracking. Everything runs locally. No accounts, no backend. Your stack throughout is Python + MetaTrader 5.

The organizing idea: trading splits into edge origination (finding a repeatable reason the market pays you — the rare half) and validation engineering (testing claims honestly — the teachable half). This course builds the second one, because it’s the half that decides whether anything you or anyone else claims actually survives contact with costs, variance, and time.

Jargon is taught by usage: every term enters the course inside the lesson where you first need it, and the glossary is generated backwards from lessons — never a wall of definitions to memorize forward.

The three level gates

Each level ends with one honest, one-line test. Pass it and you move up.

Level 1 — Measure

Measure a trade log honestly. Compute R-multiples, expectancy, drawdown, and the gross-vs-net gap from a real broker statement — and explain why a 70% win rate can lose money.

Level 2 — Validate

Take one strategy to a pre-registered verdict. Formalize a described technique into deterministic rules, backtest it on net costs, walk it forward, and report the honest result — even when the result is “no edge.”

Level 3 — Operate & Defend

Run a system that can’t lie to you. Paper-trade with circuit breakers, an attribution ledger, and pre-registered kill criteria — and produce a report a skeptic would accept.

How to use this site

Go in order

Work top to bottom: Orientation → Measure → Validate → Operate. Early lessons never lean on jargon a later lesson introduces, and every level’s skills are load-bearing for the next.

Every lesson has the same shape

Why this lesson → Watch → Explainer → Do it → Terms introduced → Check → Go deeper. Watch the videos, read the explainer, then do the hands-on exercise in Python or on your demo account.

Mark lessons complete

Each lesson has a completion toggle and a self-check quiz. Progress is saved in your browser and rolls up on the progress page.

Expect negative results

This course’s capstones are graded on honesty, not profit. The expected outcome of validating a random strategy idea is failure — reporting that correctly is what passing looks like.

Ready? Start with 0.1 · The honest map of this game — the base rates, the split, and what this course will and won’t give you.