Market fundamentals
Understand shares, market prices, company analysis and the risks behind trading instruments.
What does owning a share mean?
A share represents an ownership interest in a company. Its market price can change and ownership does not guarantee a profit.
Read the lessons
- What a stock actually represents
- Opening a demat
- NSE vs BSE
- Your first trade
- Dividends
- Market cap
- Sensex & Nifty, what 'the market fell 800 points' means
- Why stock prices move every second
- The real cost of a 'free' trade
- Delivery vs intraday
- IPOs
- Splits, bonuses & buybacks
- What a stock actually is
- NSE, BSE, SEBI
- Market participants
- How stock prices actually move
- Corporate actions
- Reading a stock quote
- Upper & lower circuits
- Pre-open session
- Auctions, settlements, T+1
- The IPO process from start to listing
- Placing your first order
- Market vs limit vs SL orders
- Intraday vs delivery
- Margin
- Brokerage, STT, GST
- What technical analysis is (and isn't)
- Candlestick basics, the trader's alphabet
- Single candlestick patterns
- Engulfing patterns
- Hammer, hanging man, shooting star
- Morning star & evening star
- Support & resistance
- Trendlines
- Moving averages
- MA crossovers
- RSI
- MACD
- Bollinger Bands
- Volume
- Volume-price analysis (VPA)
- Fibonacci retracements
- Dow Theory
- Gaps
- Chart patterns
- Multiple timeframe analysis
- Building a checklist-based trading system
- Risk-reward ratios
- Why fundamental analysis exists
- Reading an annual report
- The P&L statement decoded
- The balance sheet decoded
- Cash flow statement
- P/E ratio
- P/B ratio
- Debt-equity & financial leverage
- ROE & ROCE
- DCF
- Economic moats
- Evaluating management quality
- Cyclical vs defensive businesses
- Peer comparison
- Red flags
- Building a long-term watchlist
- What a futures contract is
- Lot size, margin, and leverage
- Mark-to-market
- Going long vs going short
- Expiry & rollover mechanics
- Basis
- Hedging with futures
- Open interest
- Futures vs options
- Physical settlement explained
- Calendar & inter-commodity spreads
- Risk management in futures
- 5 most common futures mistakes
- What an option is
- Calls vs puts
- In-the-money, at-the-money, out-of-the-money
- Intrinsic value vs time value
- How premium is priced
- Option payoff diagrams
- Buyer risk vs seller risk
- Delta
- Gamma. Delta's rate of change
- Theta
- Vega
- Rho
- Black-Scholes
- Implied volatility (IV) explained
- Volatility skew & smile
- Expiry day mechanics
- Put-call parity
- Reading the option chain
- Open interest analysis for options
- Max pain theory
- Why 90% of option buyers lose money
- Why option sellers tend to win (with risk)
- Physical settlement of options
- Weekly vs monthly expiries
- 10 common option mistakes
- Why multi-leg strategies exist
- Bull call spread
- Bull put spread
- Bear call spread
- Bear put spread
- Long straddle
- Long strangle
- Short straddle
- Short strangle
- Iron condor
- Butterfly spread
- Calendar (time) spread
- Diagonal spread
- Covered call
- STCG vs LTCG for stocks
- Intraday = speculative income, taxed at slab
- F&O counts as business income
- Calculating F&O turnover
- When you need a tax audit
- Loss set-off & carry forward rules
- Mutual fund tax
- Filing ITR-3 as a trader
- Currency markets
- RBI's role in managing the rupee
- Currency futures trading
- Gold and silver
- MCX
- Crude oil
- Agri commodities
- G-Secs
- Bond yields & what they signal
- RBI retail direct
- Inflation-indexed bonds
- Sovereign gold bonds
- T-bills
- The yield curve
- Currency-commodity correlations
- How global events ripple into Indian markets
- FII flows
- Why crude oil prices crush Indian markets
- Interest rate cycles
- Safe-haven assets in crashes
- Why discretionary trading usually fails
- Building a rule-based system
- Defining entry rules
- Defining exit rules
- Backtesting basics
- Curve-fitting
- Walk-forward testing
- Paper trading
- Broker APIs for automation
- Algo trading vs discretionary
- Trend following systems
- Mean reversion systems
- Momentum systems
- Scalping
- Swing trading
- Positional trading
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Primary reading
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