Academy
Two parallel paths to trade gold — built on one shared foundation. Start with the fundamentals, then choose your market.
Start here
Eight modules every gold trader should work through before choosing a path. Built on the standard.
How to use this Academy
Start at F1 and work through all eight Foundation modules in order — they build on each other. Once you've completed Foundation, choose the path that fits your market: Path A for XAU/USD spot gold, Path B for GC/MGC futures. If you're not sure which path is right for you, Module F8 will help you decide.
Module F1
What gold is in trading terms — troy ounces, the 995 LBMA Good Delivery standard, and how gold became a tradeable asset. From the gold standard through Bretton Woods to today's market.
Module F2
The instruments retail traders use — physical, ETFs (GLD, IAU), mining stocks (GDX), spot XAU/USD, and futures (GC/MGC). Plus the participants moving the market: central banks, miners, institutions, and retail.
Module F3
The mechanics of gold pricing. The LBMA Gold Price fix, USD denomination, troy ounces, and how price discovery works across the global market.
Module F4
The macro forces that move gold. USD strength, real interest rates, inflation, central bank policy, and geopolitical risk — and how each one shows up in price.
Module F5
When gold trades and why it matters. The 24-hour market, the Asian, London, and New York sessions, liquidity and volatility through the day, and the overlaps that move price.
Module F6
The economic calendar for gold traders. FOMC, CPI, and NFP at the top of the hierarchy, how each event maps back to the four forces, and the release times that reliably move the market.
Module F7
The numbers most education sites won't show you. Retail trader outcomes, the broker business model, and what realistic expectations actually look like.
Module F8
Choosing between XAU/USD spot trading and GC/MGC futures. Structural differences, accessibility by region, capital requirements, and which path fits which trader.
Choose your market
Most retail traders take one of these two routes to access the gold market. Pick the one that fits your account, region, and trading style.
For traders using forex brokers — the most common route for non-US retail. Six modules from instrument definition to broker selection.
Module A1
A cash-settled contract for difference — not ownership, not exchange-traded. How the price travels from COMEX through the LP chain to your screen, and where your order goes when you click.
Module A2
Lots, pip value, leverage and margin on gold. Why every order — including all four pending types — is ultimately an execution order, and what margin level, margin call and stop-out actually mean.
Module A3
Spread, commission and swap — where each is added along the chain. Why account types are just billing. Why the swap dwarfs the rest, runs in either direction, and triples on Wednesday.
Module A4
A-book, B-book and hybrid execution. Why a clean B-book is the better fill. Why retail loses on B-book brokers — and it isn't the conflict of interest. The one thing worth checking before you fund.
Module A5
Licence tiers, why a good broker runs every entity to best practice, qualifying as a wholesale client, reading reputation, the US mutual-avoidance reality, and the pre-funding checklist.
Module A6
The path in one piece. What you now know that most traders don't. The honest limit — the line between knowing the instrument and knowing how to trade it. The roads forward.
For exchange-traded futures access — the common route for US-based retail, and open to traders elsewhere. Five modules built on a single inversion: where spot collapses the market into one broker, futures pull it apart and clear it through the exchange.
Module B1
Futures aren't a parallel to spot — they're its structural inverse. GC and MGC and which one is yours, why a physical bar at .995 keeps the price honest, and the hinge the whole path turns on: novation.
Module B2
The exchange does in the open every job a broker used to do in private. Novation, daily mark-to-market and the default waterfall, the FCM as a conduit through segregated funds, and exchange-set margin.
Module B3
No spread markup — a commission per side plus exchange and clearing fees. Tick value math on MGC and GC. No overnight swap, but the cost of time is paid another way: through the roll.
Module B4
The contract lifecycle and First Notice Day — the date that tells you when to be gone. Why term structure exists, how contango shows up as negative roll yield, and the chart-gap honesty of back-adjustment.
Module B5
The futures path in one piece. What you now know about exchange-traded gold that most never learn, the honest limit of instrument knowledge, and the roads forward.
A layer over either gold instrument — spot or futures — not a market of its own. Six modules on the funded-account model: what it is, how it pays, and how to read its rulebook before you pay a fee.
Module C1
The first reframe: a funded account is a product you buy, not a job you're hired into. What you're actually purchasing when you pay for an evaluation, and what "funded" really means.
Module C2
The industry's origin — grown on a regulatory gap, stress-tested by a platform vendor, still undefined by regulators. Why the landscape reshaped itself in eighteen months.
Module C3
The conflict of interest is real on a fee-funded simulation firm and inverted on a live-capital one. Why the funding mechanism — not the instrument — tells you whose side the firm is on.
Module C4
For gold, the route decides whether you're judged against an exchange tick or a firm-controlled spread. Why you should prefer the price the firm can't move.
Module C5
The rulebook isn't neutral. Drawdown form, daily limits, and consistency rules push you toward a style — and passing an evaluation is a different task from trading well.
Module C6
The funded path in one piece. The model, the conflict, the route, the rules — the questions to ask before you pay a fee, the parts that won't go stale, and the roads forward.
The layer above the instrument and the account — the discipline of trading itself, true regardless of which path or tier brought you here. Seven modules from position sizing through post-trade review.
Module T1
The one calculation that separates sustainable trading from luck: deriving position size from a defined dollar risk, not from available margin or a round-number guess.
Module T2
The pre-market routine and research framework for gold trading. A repeatable checklist for daily orientation, and the five analytical lenses for forming a weekly market view — with honest trade-offs between them.
Module T3
Candlestick anatomy, price-action structure, and volume — the vocabulary of technical analysis taught as descriptive market literacy. What each tool shows, read as a record of past price, not a forecast.
Module T4
How to place a stop loss structurally — using confirmed swing highs and swing lows to find the level that means the trade idea is wrong — and what to do when that stop is too wide for your risk ceiling.
Module T5
How volatility regimes change what a structurally correct stop looks like — sizing the same account differently when conditions shift, without predicting direction or timing.
Module T6
How to assemble a written trading plan from the risk, structure, and regime tools already taught — and why pre-committing to process responses in writing is a psychology solution, not a knowledge one.
Module T7
In-trade discipline and post-trade review — following through on the plan from T6, logging the results, and measuring edge over a series of trades. Closes the full How to Trade lifecycle.