What you're actually trading

Welcome to Bentley Academy. Over ten short lessons, you'll go from never having placed a trade to running a paper-trading routine alongside Bentley. No real money and no hype, just how the market actually works. Lesson one: what you're actually trading.

Let's start with the most basic question. What is a price? On every exchange there are two crowds. Buyers, who post the most they're willing to pay. And sellers, who post the least they'll accept. Those orders stack up in a list called the order book. The best bid and the best ask sit right next to each other, and the small gap between them is called the spread. A trade only happens when someone stops waiting and crosses that gap. The price you see on a chart is simply the last place a buyer and a seller agreed. When buyers keep crossing, they eat through the sellers' orders one level at a time, and the price climbs. When sellers are the ones in a hurry, it falls. That's all a price move is. One side was more impatient than the other.

Bitcoin doesn't trade in one place. It trades on dozens of exchanges at once, each with its own order book. Their prices stay within a few dollars of each other, because the moment one drifts away, traders buy on the cheap exchange and sell on the expensive one until the gap closes. That's why Bentley watches more than a dozen exchanges at the same time. No single one tells you the whole story.

Now, the two ways you can trade. The first is spot. You pay for the coin, and it's yours. If you buy a thousand dollars of Bitcoin and it rises ten percent, your holding is worth eleven hundred. If it falls ten percent, it's worth nine hundred. The important part is the floor. With spot, the most you can ever lose is what you put in.

The second way is futures. A futures contract isn't the coin. It's an agreement that pays out based on where the price goes. Crypto traders mostly use a type called a perpetual, which never expires. To keep its price tied to spot, traders on one side pay the other a small fee every few hours. That fee is called funding, and we'll come back to it in lesson four. Futures add two things that spot doesn't have. You can trade the price falling, not just rising. And you can use leverage, which means controlling a bigger position than the money you put up.

Trading a rise is called going long. Trading a fall is called going short. If you're long and the price goes up, you gain. If you're short and the price goes up, you lose by the same amount. And when the price falls, it flips. Every futures trade has a long on one side and a short on the other. Bentley's trade setups are always labelled long or short, so you'll see these two words everywhere.

Here's why this matters before you ever press a button. Spot mistakes tend to be slow. Futures mistakes, with leverage, can be fast and permanent, and that's where most beginners lose their first account. So in this course, you'll practise everything on paper first. Paper trading means placing pretend trades against real prices, and tracking the results honestly. The lessons cost you nothing.

Let's recap. A price is the last agreement between a buyer and a seller. It moves when one side gets impatient. Spot means you own the coin, and you can't lose more than you put in. Futures are contracts that let you go long or short, with leverage. In the next lesson, you'll learn to read a chart. And remember, this course is education only, not financial advice.