Markets, explained
Understand Wall Street before you put money in it.
Guides that start at your first index fund and go as far as options Greeks, factor investing and Federal Reserve policy, each one edited and signed off by a named person. Plus market scanners, calculators and quizzes, all free.
- Every guide shows its arithmetic and says where the method fails
- Scanners rebuilt from the close every trading day
- No account, no paywall, no stock picks
Pick a topic and go as deep as you want
Each section opens with a guide that assumes no prior knowledge, then builds toward the material professionals actually use.
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Start here
How Wall Street Works
How the U.S. stock market is built: exchanges, market makers, order types, trading hours, IPOs, indices and the market structure rules that shape every fill.
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Investing
Stocks
From your first share purchase to reading an earnings report: valuation ratios, growth vs value, dividends, buybacks, splits and how to analyze a stock.
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Investing
ETFs & Funds
What an ETF is, how index funds track a market, ETFs vs mutual funds, what expense ratios really cost, and the sector, bond and leveraged funds to know.
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Fixed income
Bonds & Rates
How bonds work, why prices and yields move opposite, what the yield curve is saying, how Treasuries are auctioned, and what duration and credit spreads mean.
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Macro
Economy & the Fed
How the Federal Reserve sets rates, how rates flow through to stocks, and how to read CPI, the jobs report, GDP and the other releases that move markets.
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Investing
Portfolio & Risk
Asset allocation, diversification, rebalancing, dollar-cost averaging vs lump sums, measuring portfolio risk, tax-efficient investing and retirement basics.
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Trading
Trading Strategies
How to start trading stocks, the honest version of day and swing trading, momentum and mean reversion, earnings season, and the risk rules that decide who lasts.
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Charts
Technical Analysis
How to read a stock chart: candlesticks, support and resistance, moving averages, RSI and MACD, volume, chart patterns and Bollinger Bands, and their limits.
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Derivatives
Options & Derivatives
Options from first principles: calls, puts, premium, the Greeks, implied volatility, and the covered call, cash-secured put, spread and futures strategies.
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For experienced investors
Pro Desk
For experienced investors: market microstructure, factor investing, the VIX, options flow, Kelly sizing, pairs trading, macro regimes and short selling.
Market scanners, rebuilt every trading day
The S&P 500 screened, mapped and measured from the previous close, plus the Treasury curve and cross-asset correlations. The numbers crawlers see are the ones you filter.
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Which stocks match my setup today?
Stock Screener
Filter every S&P 500 stock by sector, RSI, moving averages, distance from the 52-week high, volume surge and more.
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Where did the money go today?
Sector Heatmap
Every S&P 500 stock tiled by sector and colored by the day’s move, so you see rotation at a glance.
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Is the rally broad or narrow?
Market Breadth Dashboard
Advancers versus decliners, the share of stocks above their 50- and 200-day averages, new highs and lows, and sector returns.
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Which patterns printed yesterday?
Candlestick Pattern Scanner
Hammers, engulfing candles, dojis, stars and more, detected across the S&P 500 at the last close.
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What shape is the curve?
Treasury Yield Curve
Today’s Treasury curve from 1 month to 30 years, against one month and one year ago, with the 2s10s spread.
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Am I actually diversified?
Correlation Matrix
Pick up to ten major stocks and ETFs and see how their daily returns have moved together over the past year.
New to investing? Read these first
Written at household scale, with every term defined the first time it appears.
- How to Invest in Stocks: A Beginner's Step-by-Step GuideThe account, the first purchase and the years that follow, written for the person who has been staring at the buy button for four days.
- What Is an ETF? How Exchange-Traded Funds WorkOne share, hundreds of holdings, a few dollars a year in fees. Here is the machinery behind an exchange-traded fund and what it costs you to use it.
- How Bonds Work: Coupons, Prices and Why Yields Move OppositeThe payments written into a bond never change. The price changes every day. Almost everything confusing about the bond market falls out of that one arrangement, worked through here in dollars.
- Asset Allocation: The Decision That Drives Most of Your ReturnsBefore you choose a single fund, you choose how much of your money sits in stocks and how much sits in bonds and cash. Here is how to make that decision on purpose.
- Stock Order Types Explained: Market, Limit, Stop and MoreThe order type you choose decides whether you control your price or your certainty of getting filled. You cannot have both, and picking the wrong one is expensive in predictable ways.
- How the Federal Reserve Works: The FOMC, Rates and the Dual MandateCongress built the Federal Reserve out of an argument it could not settle, and the committee that sets the price of overnight money publishes everything it decides. Reading those documents is the skill.
Pro Desk
For readers past the basics: microstructure, factors, volatility, sizing and the signals that never make the evening news.
- Market Microstructure: How Prices Actually FormA price is the output of a queue, an auction and a set of dealers pricing the risk that you know something they do not. Here is the machinery underneath the last trade.
- Factor Investing: Value, Momentum, Quality, Size and Low VolatilityA factor is a rule for sorting stocks and a return series attached to that rule. Here are the formulas, one worked attribution, and an honest account of how long the bad stretches run.
- Volatility and the VIX: What It Measures and How It Is TradedVIX 20 is a statement about a 5.8 percent move over the next month. Turning that statement into a position runs through futures, roll yield and a product that once lost almost everything overnight.
- Options Flow, the Put/Call Ratio and Gamma ExposureA large options print tells you less than the alert says it does. Dealer hedging flows tell you more, and they can be computed from open interest with one line of arithmetic.
- The Kelly Criterion and Position Sizing Beyond the 1% RuleKelly answers a question the 1 percent rule never asks: given an edge, what fraction of capital maximizes long run growth? The answer is computable, and it is almost always too large to use.
- Pairs Trading and Statistical ArbitrageA pair trade is a bet that a computed spread reverts. Here is the regression that gives you the hedge ratio, the z-score that gives you the entry, and the reasons the relationship stops holding.
Calculators with the formula on the page
Options pricing, bond yields, discounted cash flow, position sizing, fees. Each one shows a worked example that matches its defaults, so you can check the arithmetic.
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What is the business worth?
DCF Intrinsic Value Calculator
Discount projected free cash flows to a per-share value, with a terminal value and a margin of safety.
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Is this stock expensive?
P/E and Earnings Yield Calculator
Trailing and forward P/E, PEG ratio and earnings yield, compared against the 10-year Treasury.
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What did this investment really return?
Stock Return and CAGR Calculator
Total return including dividends, compound annual growth rate, and what the same money would have done at a benchmark rate.
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What does this strategy pay at expiry?
Options Strategy Builder
Combine up to four option legs and stock, then see the payoff diagram, breakevens, max profit and max loss.
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What should this option cost?
Black-Scholes and Greeks Calculator
Theoretical call and put prices with delta, gamma, theta, vega and rho, plus an implied volatility solver.
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What does this covered call yield?
Covered Call Return Calculator
Static return, if-called return, breakeven and annualized yield for a covered call position.
Test yourself
Ten questions each, with an explanation and a guide link behind every answer.
Desk Notes
First-person and signed, unlike the guides: the trade, the data release or the fee that taught someone something.
How this is made
No bylines, because inventing one would be the least trustworthy thing on the page. A named person still reads every guide before it goes up. Here is what produces one, and what never touches it.
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Drafted with AI, checked by a named person
Every guide and quiz is drafted with AI assistance under human direction, then reviewed and edited by one of three people. Each page says which of them, under its heading.
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The numbers are computed, never generated
Every figure in the scanners comes from our own code running over published price data. The rules are printed on the page, so you can check the arithmetic.
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No picks, no targets, no forecasts
Nothing here tells you what to buy. If a claim cannot be attributed in the sentence you are reading, we describe the behaviour and attach no number to it.
How we work
No picks. No signals. Working shown.
- Arithmetic on the page. When a claim rests on a calculation, the calculation is there for you to check.
- Failure conditions. Every method guide gives the same space to where it breaks as to where it works.
- No invented statistics. Where a figure cannot be sourced, we describe the behaviour instead.
- Independence. No broker commissions, no sponsored articles, nothing behind a paywall. Editorial policy →