TradeWize · Blog

Investing, explained in plain English.

Everything you need to understand investing and keep up with the markets.

Technical analysis12 min read

What Is a Moving Average? Why Being Late Is the Whole Point

It is the average of the last N closing prices, it is always a step behind the market, and that second part is not the flaw everyone treats it as. The lag is the mechanism.

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Technical analysis12 min read

What Are Chart Patterns? Why the Shapes Are Just Structure With a Name

There are about a dozen named shapes, and traders talk about them as if each were its own species. They aren't. Every one is the same three parts wearing a different hat.

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Technical analysis10 min read

Swing Highs and Swing Lows: Why Price Keeps Stopping in the Same Places

Every chart has a handful of prices it keeps bumping into and refusing to cross. They aren't magic, they aren't lines, and there is a genuinely good reason they exist.

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Derivatives13 min read

What Is an Options Contract? How Calls and Puts Actually Work

You can be right about the direction and still lose most of your money, because you didn't only buy a view on the price. You bought a deadline.

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Derivatives10 min read

What Is a CFD? The Trade Where You Never Own Anything

There's no exchange, no share certificate, no seat at the AGM — just a contract with a broker who books the other side of your bet. Here's what you're actually holding.

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Derivatives9 min read

What Is Leverage in Trading? The Multiplier That Cuts Both Ways

Every blown-up account has the same autopsy: the idea was survivable, the size wasn't. Leverage is the multiplier that decides which one you're running — here's exactly how it works.

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Derivatives9 min read

What Is a Futures Contract? How Futures Trading Works

Every time the news says "oil futures jumped," it's talking about a 300-year-old farmer's trick that now moves trillions of dollars — and can double your money or vaporise it before lunch.

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Funds & ETFs9 min read

What Is Duration? Why a “Safe” Bond Fund Can Still Lose You Money

Bonds are supposed to be the boring, sensible part of a portfolio. Then 2022 happened, and the safest bonds on earth fell harder than most people thought possible. One number explains why — and it was printed on the fact sheet the whole time.

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Reading the numbers7 min read

What Are Retained Earnings? The Profit a Company Decides to Keep

It sounds like a company's savings account. It's one of the most misread lines on the balance sheet — and the jar is nearly always empty.

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Investing basics8 min read

What Is a Balanced Fund? The One-Fund Portfolio, Explained

Stocks and bonds, blended into a single fund that rebalances itself while you get on with your life. It's the closest thing investing has to a set-and-forget button — with a small catch or two.

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How markets work9 min read

The Market Already Priced In the War

A ceasefire broke this week, oil spiked, and the Dow shed 570 points in an afternoon. Forty-eight hours later the market had already moved on. That's not luck — it's the single most misunderstood idea in investing.

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Funds & ETFs8 min read

Index Fund vs ETF vs Mutual Fund: What's the Real Difference?

Three names, two of them mean the same kind of thing, and one isn't even in the same category. Here's the map.

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