The word "Trading" is an umbrella term for the exchange of goods at a point in time. Trading uses these markets where you will be capitalizing off of the facilitation and the exchange of goods. The same way someone is willing to buy a fruit at a price is the same way a person is willing to buy a stock or commodity like a car. Once you start to associate a demand with every particular thing in life, trading becomes easier. People change their mind about how much they are willing to pay for things all the time, this is called demand. Every stock, car, piece of technology, or even a gold brick will always have demand for it at any given time, and trading is all about knowing when it's likely for demand of a product to go up or go down given the variety of factors related to the underlying product at the time.
For example, if a Beyblade commercial starts to get kids interested in buying their toys, the demand for Beyblades will go up. Now, imagine only 100 Beyblades are released by the company who makes them; if 100 people buy up all the Beyblades priced at $10, the first person who doesn't want their Beyblade anymore can sell it for $11. This facilitation of scarce goods is what makes markets like Bitcoin and the S&P500 "tradeable". The things we will be "trading" are scarce, which allows us to capitalize on the fluctuations in demand, completely online at the comfort of a nice chair.
At its core, trading is simply the act of exchanging goods, services, or assets. In financial markets, this means buying things like stocks, cryptocurrencies,or commodities with the goal of selling what you bought later when the price is higher making a profit from the price rising.
Stocks represent ownership of a company. This is kind of a weird concept to me still lowkey, but whenever you purchase shares, you own a piece of that business. The Stock price of a company is directly tied to it's ability to reamin profitable and the demand of the company's services/products. Traders usually try to figure out if they can profit from a companys stock they believe to be undervalued by looking at price movements driven by earnings reports, market sentiment, macroeconomic factors, along with technical analysis. All of these things kind of matter, but I would say the most imporant things to consider when determining if a stock is undervalued and if its a good time to buy it is looking at its potentiality to continue growing in the future/near term and waiting for a liquidity sweep on a higher time frame. If you are new to trading, dont worry about that last sentence too much but go back to it later when you understand more because it can help you know when to buy a asset.
Futures is basiclly the same thing as a parlay for assets. When you buy an asset like a stock, a commonity like gold, or even a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin in order to lose all you money the price has to go to zero. This is likey never to happen. Vise Versa, it might take a really long time to double your money with a asset you have invested in so people use something called futures to speed up the process. Insted of waiting 2 years to get double your money, a person can buy the "futures" of an asset to speed up their profit time. People can speed up their time to profit or lose money through futures because it is the same as holding the asset regularly but with leverage. This means if you have a futures contract with 2x leverage, Insted of losing all your money when the asset goes to zero, you will lose your money at half the price of your entry. This is also true the oppisite way, with leverage, for example 2x leverage, when the asset goes up 10% insted of making a 10% gain you will make 20% because of the leverage. Leverage allows traders to “bet” on the future price of an asset (like oil, gold), (the S&P 500), or even crypto while shorting the margin it takes to profit(or lose money).
The global exchange of currencies. This is usually the most liquid market in the world, also being open 24/7. Currencies flutate all the time and you can profit from these fluctuations by trading them. Forex is the largest financial market in the world, with a daily trading volume exceeding $6 trillion. Traders speculate on currency price movements based on price action on the bar chart, economic indicators, and geopolitical events.
Asset prices can be analyzed on tradingview.com (free), here you can look at price flucations of all assets in the world. Tradingview shows you the price of assets in a bar chart format, which is the most common way to look at price fluctuations.
A DEX is a trading platform that allows you to make trades without the need for extremlly sensitive personal imformation like your passport. Unlike traditional stock exchanges like Robinhood, DEXs use enterprise grade secerity techniques facilitate peer-to-peer trading directly between users. Basiclly all this means is that it is a safe place you can trade assets on.
DEXs typically use unchanable code to facilitate trades for it's users. DEX's are so good for trading because DEXs allow you to trade a variety of assets and you use something called a "web3 wallet" to trade on them. A web3 wallet is a digital wallet that allows you to interact with DEX's and retain complete control over your funds unlike a Robinhood where they hold your funds for you.
DEXs excel at trading various tokenized assets including traditional cryptocurrencies, commodities, goverment bonds, and even stocks. Popular DEX platforms include gtrade, Hyperliquid, and Ostium.app. Each offers slightly different features but follows the same core principle of being an online trading platform. The main advantages are lower fees, no need for account creation or KYC, direct wallet-to-wallet trading, and 24/7 availability. However, users need to manage their wallet navigate the technical aspects of a "web3 wallet". This can be done using Metamask, an example of a "web3 wallet".
This is the most important part of trading, the how? As I said before, trading mainly consists of three things: