为何我们的教育内容免费且不设门槛

Open the education section of many broker sites and you will find a funnel wearing a library's clothes. The first lessons are free. Then a wall: register to continue, deposit to unlock the "advanced" tier, book a call to reach the masterclass. The content is not the offer; it is bait for one. We built our library the other way round. This piece sets out exactly what is in it, what the zero-lock policy means in engineering terms, and why we think an ungated library is the commercially sane choice, not merely the virtuous one.

What the stack actually contains

Three things, all free, none requiring an account or a deposit. First, 44 education articles, 384 minutes of reading in total, a little over six hours, organised into six regions: first steps, how markets work, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, risk management and trading psychology. The largest region is risk management, with nine articles. That weighting is deliberate: risk is where a syllabus earns its keep, and it is the region the industry most often buries.

Four measured routes run through the catalogue, each an ordered reading sequence with a stated purpose. A route is a curated path, not a partition (one article sits on two routes, seven belong to none), so the counts below describe the sequences, not the whole library.

Second, a 66-term glossary across eight categories, from pricing to account mechanics. Each term carries a plain-language definition, a graph of related terms, and, where one exists, a link to the product surface where the concept is at work: spread points at the forex market pages and their reference pricing, swap at the page explaining how our published prices are made. Third, five calculators: position size, pip value, margin, profit and loss, and spread cost. They are the working end of the syllabus: several education articles deep-link straight into a calculator so you can re-run their worked examples live, because a formula you can push numbers through is worth several paragraphs of prose about it.

Zero locks, as an engineering fact

The education hub's stat row reads "0 locked · 0 gated". It would be easy to dismiss that as marketing copy. It is not. The hub's other figures, from the article count to the reading minutes, are computed from the content catalogue at build time rather than typed by hand. The zeros are enforced differently, and more deeply: they are declared constants pinned by tests, and they are honest by construction, because the article metadata schema has no field that could mark a lock, a gate, or a deposit tier. There is nothing to count.

A locked article is not merely absent from our catalogue. It is unrepresentable in it.

The industry pattern we decided against

The gated academy is a recognisable template. Tier one is free and superficial. Tier two unlocks at the first deposit. The "pro" tier (webinars, strategy sessions, one-to-one coaching) sits behind a higher balance or a phone call with a sales desk. The logic is straightforward: if education is treated as an acquisition cost, gating it converts curiosity into deposits, and the syllabus becomes a script for the sales team.

We rejected the template for two reasons. The first is incentive honesty: gating makes the moment of learning and the moment of selling the same moment, and a syllabus that must convert deposits cannot afford its most useful chapters. Nobody upsells a reader by teaching them position sizing before prediction — that article, if it does its job, makes the reader slower to deposit and smaller when they do. The second reason is commercial, and we would rather state it than have it inferred: a regulated CFD broker's revenue compounds with clients who last. Our bet is that clients who understand margin, financing and position sizing before they fund an account make fewer support-intensive mistakes and stay longer. Free education is not philanthropy; it is the business model that does not require an uninformed customer to work.

Where the loss-warning regime comes in

There is a regulatory backdrop to this. In March 2018, ESMA agreed EU-wide intervention measures on CFDs after analyses by national regulators found that 74–89% of retail CFD accounts across EU jurisdictions typically lost money ¹. The final measures, applying to CFDs from 1 August 2018, include a standardised risk warning that every provider must display, stating the percentage of losses on its own retail investor accounts ². The FCA made an equivalent regime permanent in the UK, with rules in force for CFDs from 1 August 2019 ³.

Retail CFD accounts losing money, per NCA analyses (2018)

74–89%^†

EU standardised loss-figure warning in force

1 Aug 2018^†

UK rules made permanent for CFDs

1 Aug 2019^†

We think that regime is right, and we think a warning is only as useful as the reader's ability to interrogate it. A percentage on its own answers very little: measured over what period? Counting which accounts? Weighted how? An education stack is what turns the disclosure from compliance into communication. That is why the one article our hub marks as a hazard is why most traders lose money, and why this Journal's opening pieces include what a loss percentage actually tells you: the warning, and the literacy to read it, shipped together.

What we add next

The stack's newest layer is the one you are reading: this Journal. It is an editorial surface for the material that outgrows a syllabus (mechanics, costs, regulation, market structure), written under the same discipline as the education hub: numbers computed or cited, never asserted; primary sources listed at the foot of every piece; and honesty about what our own site does, down to the fact that our published prices are reference data on a 60-minute cache, not a live execution feed. What the Journal will not carry is as fixed as what it will: no signals, no forecasts, no market calls dressed as analysis.

None of this is complicated. Forty-four articles, sixty-six terms, five calculators, and now a journal: free because informed clients are the only kind we want, and ungated because a library that interrogates its visitors is a funnel. The library is open; read it in any order you like, and hold us to the numbers.