If you're just starting to understand trading, the first thing you need to grasp is how people actually make money from it. Going long is when you buy an asset, expecting to sell it at a higher price and profit from the increase. Going short works the opposite—you sell first, then buy back at a lower price, also making a profit. It sounds simple, but the devil is in the details.

The entry point in trading is your point of entry into a position, meaning the price at which you open the trade. From this moment, your entire game begins. But opening a trade is not enough; you also need to protect yourself. For this, a stop-loss is used—a pending order that automatically closes your position if the price moves against you and hits a critical loss level. The stop-loss protects your capital from large losses.

Once you've determined your entry point and stop-loss, you need to understand where to take profits. Take-profit is your pending order to lock in gains. You specify in advance at what price you want to exit the trade with a profit. All of this together is called a setup—a working scenario with an entry point, stop-loss, and take-profits.

Now, about more complex moments. Traders often talk about lower and higher timeframes, or LTF and HTF. These are simply different time intervals for analyzing the price. On higher timeframes, you see the overall picture; on lower timeframes, you can catch small movements.

Two other important phenomena are traps and corrections. A trap is when the market gives a false signal, like indicating that the price will go up or down, but then unexpectedly reverses in the opposite direction. Beginners often lose money on this because they didn't thoroughly check the scenario. A correction is a more natural process—when the price moves against the current trend, but it's not a reversal, just a pullback before continuing the main movement. This is a normal part of market dynamics, and experienced traders use corrections to enter at more favorable points.