Retail watches the price. Professionals study what produced it.
Most investors read the market by reading the chart, they watch the candle and assume it tells them what happened. On August 5, 2024, the yen carry trade unwound and Bitcoin fell from $61,000 to near $49,000 in 24 hours. If you were watching the chart, you saw a terrifying candle. But the candle was only the output. Underneath it, an entire machine was moving. This miniclass takes the opposite approach, it studies what produced the price, not just the price.
It maps the layers professionals watch that retail never sees. It starts with spot versus derivatives and perpetual futures, then the funding rate as the market's temperature gauge for positioning. From there it moves into the OTC market and why most institutional flow never touches the public order book, how on-chain data reveals what the order book hides, and the role of market makers, the invisible force behind price, whose inventory decides whether liquidity is there or gone.
That sets up the real lesson: why buying the dip is harder than it looks. When stress hits, liquidity disappears exactly when you want to use it, and there's a hard line between being a liquidity provider and a liquidity consumer. The framework is asset-agnostic and built for investors who want to stop reacting to candles and start reading the map underneath them. The data to read that map is more available than ever, what's rare is the literacy to use it.
A short introduction to how portfolios are structured: position roles, correlation, storage, and rebalancing as general concepts.
An introduction to why the size of a holding affects portfolio outcomes, and to the concepts commonly used to describe sizing.
An introduction to the indicators people use to describe where a market cycle may be, and to how unreliable those signals are.