How to Use This Book
Chapter 1 — How to Use This Book
1. Definition
This is a training programme in book form. It is not a reference you consult and it is not a collection of setups you copy. Every chapter asks you to do something — mark charts, fill a tally sheet, measure a base rate in your own market — and the chapters that follow assume you did it.
There are eight volumes. This one is about when: sessions, killzones and the structure of the trading day. Volume 2 is liquidity, Volume 3 market structure, Volume 4 the arrays price delivers to, Volume 5 narrative, Volume 6 execution and risk, Volume 7 psychology, Volume 8 backtesting.
Time comes first because everything after it is timestamped. The same pattern at 09:45 and at 14:20 is not the same information.
2. Institutional reasoning
The honesty contract
Some of what you are about to read has been tested. Some of it has not. This book tells you which, chapter by chapter, and that is the single most important thing to understand about how to read it.
Every concept in this system sits at one of five stages:
| Stage | What exists |
|---|---|
| 1 | A definition and the reasoning behind it |
| 2 | A workflow you can follow, with worked examples |
| 3 | A precise specification — inputs, outputs, parameters |
| 4 | Working code, in Python and on the chart |
| 5 | A validation report on data the model had never seen |
Only Stage 5 means proven. Everything below it means we have described something carefully and have not yet demonstrated that it makes money. Most of what any trading educator teaches — including much of this book — sits below Stage 5. The difference here is that we say so.
Where a concept is unvalidated, its chapter says hypothesis under test in the opening paragraph. When you meet that phrase, treat the chapter as an experiment you are being handed, not a rule you are being given. The manual-backtesting block in those chapters is not homework. It is the actual point.
Rules that bind us, so you can check whether we kept them
Every performance figure carries its sample size. A win rate without a trade count is an anecdote. If you find one in this book without one, we made a mistake.
Rejected ideas stay in the book. Things we tested and abandoned are written up alongside things that worked. A dead rule that is not written down gets retested forever — by us, and by you.
Backtested results are an upper bound. Live trading degrades them. Plan for a realised drawdown three to four times the backtested figure and you will be roughly right.
Concepts are credited. Where an idea originates with a named educator, the chapter says so. What this firm claims is its own formalisation, its own code and its own evidence — never the underlying concepts.
How to actually work through it
Read a chapter. Do the exercises before the next one. Fill the tally sheet even when the answer seems obvious, because the number you measure in your own market beats the number you read in any book, including this one.
You will move slowly. That is correct. A trader who has personally measured how often the prior session's high gets taken in the first hour knows something. A trader who has read that it happens often knows nothing.
9. Cross references
Leads to:
- Chapter 2 — the market you are trading, and why the instrument matters
- Chapter 6 — the trading session, the first concept in the system
- Volume 8 — backtesting, where the tally sheets in this volume become a method
This chapter has no concept id. It teaches nothing about markets; it explains how the rest of the programme is built.