A curriculum from a working trading desk.
Written by the people who run the trading book. Structured around the disciplines a serious self-trader actually needs — market structure, risk, algorithmic execution on our trading platform, signal construction, and the operational hygiene that separates careers from accidents.
Every module is written and delivered by traders running live capital.
No motivational marketing, no leverage glamour. The curriculum looks like the job.
Built for people who want to trade their own money — not be sold a managed account.
Eight modules. One continuous path.
- 01Foundations4 weeks
Market structure & instruments
How global markets actually work — venues, participants, settlement, and the mechanics of every instrument class we trade.
- · Exchanges, ECNs, and OTC venues
- · FX, equities, futures, options — the practical differences
- · Order types, time-in-force, and execution priority
- · Settlement, custody, and counterparty risk basics
- 02Foundations6 weeks
Technical & quantitative analysis
Classical chart reading paired with the statistical methods that turn pattern recognition into testable hypotheses.
- · Price action, support / resistance, and trend structure
- · Volatility, correlation, and stationarity
- · Backtesting fundamentals — bias, look-ahead, and survivorship
- · From discretionary setups to quantitative rules
- 03Intermediate3 weeks
Risk management & position sizing
The most important discipline in trading. How to define, enforce, and never override risk limits on a real account.
- · Per-trade, daily, and portfolio loss budgets
- · Position sizing by Kelly fraction, volatility, and risk parity
- · Hard stops vs mental stops — why only one survives
- · Circuit breakers and automated kill switches
- 04Intermediate8 weeks
Algorithmic trading on our trading platform
Designing, building, and deploying algorithmic strategies on our platform — from a clean our scripting language base to a supervised live deployment.
- · Our scripting language fundamentals for trading systems
- · Order management, slippage handling, and broker quirks
- · Walk-forward backtesting and parameter robustness
- · Live deployment, VPS hosting, and monitoring
- 05Advanced6 weeks
Building & calibrating trading signals
How a signal is constructed, tested, sized, and retired. Applied to FX, indices, and commodities.
- · Feature engineering on price and order-flow data
- · Probability calibration vs ranking
- · Combining signals into a portfolio
- · Detecting model decay and turning signals off
- 06Intermediate2 weeks
Trader operations & journaling
The boring infrastructure that keeps a serious trader honest — journals, reviews, post-mortems, and process hygiene.
- · Trade journals that actually get read
- · Weekly and monthly performance reviews
- · Post-mortems on losses without ego
- · Calendar, sleep, and the human side of the desk
- 07Advanced2 weeks
Broker selection & multi-broker setups
How professional self-traders pick, monitor, and rotate brokers, and how to structure capital across multiple venues.
- · Regulatory tiers and what they actually mean
- · Live execution testing methodology
- · Counterparty concentration limits
- · Withdrawal and treasury management
- 08Advanced5 weeks
Building automated risk systems
Designing the enforcing layer that sits between your strategies and the market. Pre-trade checks, intraday limits, and kill switches.
- · Pre-trade gates and order interception
- · Intraday and daily P&L circuit breakers
- · Position, leverage, and exposure dashboards
- · Designing systems that override the trader by design
Every module maps to something we actually do.
The course is not abstract. Each block of the curriculum corresponds to a working service line at Defam.
Proprietary Trading
Own capital. Quantitative discipline. Systematic execution.
Explore service→Fintech & Software Development Consulting
Trading platforms and market infrastructure, engineered to spec.
Explore service→Risk Management Systems
Automated controls between the trader and the market.
Explore service→Ready to talk?
Enrolment is by application. We keep cohorts small on purpose.