Crypto Trading
What makes crypto markets structurally different from traditional ones — continuous trading, custody risk, fragmented liquidity — and what that changes about how you approach them.
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Crypto is not a separate discipline of trading, but it is a distinctly different environment: it trades continuously, liquidity is fragmented across venues, the leverage on offer is unusually high, and you can lose your assets in ways that have nothing to do with price.
This course covers the environment. It covers no coin, no token and no project.
What you will learn
- Describe the structural differences between crypto markets and traditional exchange-traded markets
- Explain custody risk and the meaning of "not your keys, not your coins" in operational terms
- Distinguish spot from derivatives in crypto and identify which risks belong to which
- Identify the categories of risk that are specific to this asset class rather than to trading generally
- Compare the backing models behind stablecoins and explain what a depeg does to a position
- Explain where an order settles on a centralised venue versus on-chain, and what each route costs
Prerequisites
- Trading Foundations
Course contents
Module 1 — What is different
Structure, hours, fragmentation and settlement.
How Crypto Markets Differ
Crypto trades continuously, across many venues with separate order books, with retail-accessible leverage far above traditional norms. Those three structural facts change the practical experience more than any chart pattern does.
8 min read
Module 2 — Holding and trading
Custody, counterparty risk and product choice.
Custody and Exchange Risk
Assets on an exchange are a claim on that exchange, not assets you hold. Understanding what that means operationally — before you need to — is the difference between an inconvenience and a total loss.
8 min read
Spot vs Derivatives in Crypto
Spot means you own the asset. A derivative means you hold a contract whose value tracks the asset — with margin, liquidation and funding attached. They are different instruments with different failure modes.
8 min read
Module 3 — Settlement, venues and the clock
What you settle in, where the trade settles, and what a market with no close changes.
Stablecoins and Settlement Risk
A stablecoin is a claim on something or someone, engineered to trade near a reference price. Stability is the design goal and the marketing word — not a property of the token — and the peg is the part that breaks first when the mechanism is tested.
8 min read
On-Chain versus Exchange Trading
On a centralised exchange your order meets a matching engine and settles as a ledger entry. On-chain, your order is a transaction that settles on a network when a block includes it. The costs, the timing and the failure modes all differ.
9 min read
Crypto Volatility and Round-the-Clock Markets
A market with no close removes the boundaries that traditional risk management quietly relies on. Gaps still happen, thin hours still cost more, and the position you cannot watch is the one your sizing has to survive.
9 min read