Reading list

Resources

Short on purpose. Six books, three documents, four data sources and a going-live toolkit will take you further than a hundred bookmarked links you never open.

Use a computer for this course and for trading. Everything works on a phone, but the chart, drawing tools, order ticket and quizzes are built for a wide screen and a mouse. The full checklist for going live is in Module 6: Going live.

Books worth the time

Trading in the Zone

Mark Douglas

The standard text on trading psychology. Repetitive by design, because the point takes repetition to land.

Technical Analysis of the Financial Markets

John Murphy

The reference for chart reading. Use it as a dictionary, not a novel.

Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom

Van Tharp

Where thinking in R and expectancy comes from. The position sizing chapters are the valuable part.

The Bitcoin Standard

Saifedean Ammous

A strongly argued case for Bitcoin as money. Read it for the monetary history and stay sceptical of the conclusions.

Fooled by Randomness

Nassim Taleb

Why a run of profits proves much less than it feels like it does. Relevant to every trading result you will ever see.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

The biases in Module 5, from the source. Long, and worth it.

Primary documents

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008

Nine pages. Read it once so that you have read the original rather than a summary of a summary.

Ethereum Whitepaper

Vitalik Buterin, 2013

The case for a programmable blockchain, written before any of it existed.

A project whitepaper and tokenomics page

Any token you are considering

Supply schedule, allocation and vesting terms. Ten minutes here beats an hour of chart reading.

Data and tools

CoinGecko

Prices, market cap, supply

Used by this site for the market board, rankings and global statistics. The free API needs no key.

Binance public API

Candles, depth, funding

Used by this site for candlestick data, live websocket ticks, order book depth and funding rates.

A block explorer for each chain you use

Verification

Confirm a transaction yourself rather than trusting a screenshot. Every chain has one.

Token unlock trackers

Supply calendar

Check the next three unlock cliffs before holding any token through them.

Real-money toolkit: what to have before your first live trade

A computer, not a phone, for placing trades

Any laptop from the last five years, 8 GB memory

This site and every real exchange are built for a wide screen and a mouse. Phones are for reading lessons and emergency closes. Keep the machine updated and free of unknown extensions.

Backup power and backup internet

UPS or laptop battery, mobile data hotspot

Load-shedding is a trading risk: an open position you cannot reach is unmanaged. Know how to hotspot before you need to.

Dedicated email + password manager

Bitwarden, 1Password, KeePass are examples

One address used only for exchanges and wallets, and a different long password for every login.

Authenticator app, not SMS

Aegis, Google Authenticator, Authy are examples

SIM swaps defeat SMS codes. Turn on the exchange anti-phishing code and the withdrawal address whitelist too. Backup codes on paper.

Hardware wallet for what you are not trading

Ledger, Trezor are examples

Buy new, direct from the maker. Seed phrase on paper or metal, offline, in two places. Never typed into any website.

An established exchange with a kwacha P2P market

Binance, Bybit, OKX, Kraken are examples

Check what is legal and practical for you in Malawi before funding; this changes. Prefer venues with proof of reserves that paid withdrawals through past crashes.

Mobile money and a bank account you control

Airtel Money, TNM Mpamba, your bank

For P2P in and out. Keep the chat and payment reference as evidence. Size from the parallel rate you actually pay, not the official one.

Charts and calculators

This site, TradingView free plan, the Tools page

Every indicator taught here exists on TradingView under the same name. Use the position size calculator before every trade.

A journal and a transaction record

The journal here, a spreadsheet, Koinly or CoinTracking

Export exchange history monthly. Tax rules differ by country and change; keep records now, ask a local accountant later.

A written plan with a daily loss limit

From Module 6, printed, next to the computer

Start with $50 to $100 real and 1% risk. Two full stops in a day means the computer goes off. Size up only when the plan says so.

How to read anything in this space

Ask who profits from you believing it

Incentives first

Almost every public opinion about a token is held by somebody who owns it or is paid to promote it.

Prefer primary sources

Documents over commentary

Contract addresses, vesting schedules and on-chain data are checkable. Threads are not.

Require an invalidation

Falsifiability

If a claim has no price or event that would prove it wrong, it cannot be traded and should not be sized.

Distrust precision

False confidence

A target of $73,412 is not more researched than a target of "around $73,000". It is less honest.

What is deliberately not here

Signal groups and paid calls. If the calls were profitable, trading them would earn more than selling them.
Copy trading platforms. Leaderboards select for survivors who took enormous risk, and you inherit their sizing along with their entries.
Automated bots sold as a product. A strategy that works is not sold at a monthly subscription. It is run quietly.
Any resource promising a specific return. Nobody can promise a return in a market that moves 7% on an ordinary day.

The part of this list that matters most is the smallest: read Module 5 again whenever a loss feels larger than it should have been.