How to read the crypto market: a fact-based course

A free EVA course: market and leverage, orders and fees, the order book, the tape, delta and CVD, footprint, open interest, funding, liquidations, exchange flows, macro and risk. No signals or forecasts — mechanics and honest stats.

Lessons are open to everyone. Tests with answer reviews, progress and the section order are in the terminal after signing in with Telegram.

1. How the market works: spot, futures, leverage — What exactly you buy on spot and on futures, how to calculate profit and loss with leverage — as a percentage of margin and of the position, who makers, takers and aggressors are, and why price moves only through trades.
2. Orders and execution: price, fees, slippage — Limit, market and stop orders, take-profit; how a market order fills across several prices and how to compute the average fill price; maker and taker fees on entry and exit — charged on the position, not the margin; slippage and common calculation mistakes.
3. The order book: bids, asks, spread and depth — How the order book works: levels, best prices, the spread and the mid price; depth and how a market order eats through levels; thin and thick books in the EVA archive; multi-exchange books and what the book does not show.
4. Liquidity walls: what rests and what gets pulled — What a dense order and a wall are, how a filled wall differs from a pulled one, what spoofing is, how to read book imbalance by distance bands and the heatmap — and why a wall is an intention, not money.
5. The tape: orders, merging, pace — What the tape and prints are, why an exchange sends one order as a dozen trades, how EVA merges them back, what “large” means on its own venue, how to read tape pace — and what the tape does not show.
6. Volume and the volume profile — What bar volume says and does not say, why volumes of different exchanges do not match, how the volume profile, POC and value area (VAH/VAL) work, how to read high volume without movement, and session profiles.
7. Delta and CVD: who was pressing — Bar delta is market buys minus market sells; CVD is delta added up. Why “there were more buyers” is the wrong phrase, how to read the slope, why futures and spot are shown separately, and what delta does not show.
8. Divergences, absorption, CVD by trade size — When price and CVD go different ways, when market flow is met by limit orders, and which orders are pressing — small, medium or large. With honest statistics from our archive: 53 continuations against 54 reversals.
9. Footprint: inside the candle — What happened between the open and the close: market sells and buys at each price level, the candle's POC, the diagonal imbalance and stacked imbalances — with calculations, a real BTC bar from the archive and an honest count over a week.
10. Open interest — How many futures positions are open, how every trade changes that number, why OI in dollars misleads when the price moves, and what our archive honestly says about OI growth.
11. Funding — Why a perpetual future has a payment between longs and shorts, who pays whom, how to compare rates of exchanges with different intervals, what it costs a position, and what our archive says about “overheated” funding.
12. Liquidations: mechanics and maths — Why the exchange closes a position itself, what maintenance margin is, how to estimate the liquidation price and why it is closer than “100% / leverage”, how a stop differs from a liquidation, and what follows the heaviest hours.
13. Cascades and the liquidation map — How one forced trade pushes the price into the next, why the chain breaks, what the estimated liquidation map really draws and why a liquidation total always names its exchanges. With 378 bursts from our archive.
14. Exchange flows and whales — What a coin transfer to or from an exchange shows through our node, why a transfer is a chance to sell rather than a sale, how to read stablecoins, ETFs and exchange reserves with their delays, and who the off-exchange “whales”, US government wallets and Hyperliquid whales are. With two days, 12–13.10.2026, worked through.
15. Macro and news — The release calendar: time, forecast, previous value and the actual from the primary source; why the market reacts to the deviation from expectations rather than the number itself; what happens to the book before a release; how to read dominance and the TOTAL caps; news and retellings of retellings. With 19 US releases from EVA's calendar worked through.
16. Risk: position size and stop — How much you may lose on one trade, where the stop goes and how these two numbers give the position size; what leverage really does, how much of R fees eat, and why the percentages on the exchange screen are not percentages of the account.
17. Risk: streaks, expectancy, journal — How much a system makes per trade on average, why losing streaks are inevitable, how recovery from a drawdown is computed, what to record in a trading journal and which mistakes break even profitable trading.
18. Using EVA as a whole — The tab order and the day's order — from general to particular; the “?” sign and the “what it does not show” point; how to read “no data”, the source and the time of data; narrow alerts; replay for an honest review of an entry, and a journal in R.