Where can I learn futures trading from scratch for free?

01What to learn first, second and third

There is more free futures material online than you could read in a year, and that is exactly the problem. Most beginners start with a video about a strategy, hear the words margin, funding and liquidation, understand none of them, and conclude that they need a paid mentor to explain it all. You don't. You need to learn the same things in the sequence you will meet them on screen.

Learn the words first, the chart second, and only then touch any buttons — even demo buttons. A person who knows what liquidation is will never set 50x leverage out of curiosity, and that one piece of knowledge is worth more than any strategy you could buy.

02Week 1: the words you will actually see on screen

Your first week is reading, not trading. Start with what a futures contract actually is and why people use it instead of simply buying coins, then what long and short mean, then leverage and the deposit the exchange holds while your trade is open. Finish the week with the two things that quietly eat money: fees and funding.

Give the scariest word its own evening. Liquidation is when the exchange closes your trade because the margin you set aside has run out, and understanding how close that price sits to your entry changes how you size everything later. Pair it with the stop-loss, which is how you decide your own exit before the exchange decides it for you.

Alongside this site, use the exchange's own help pages — they are free and they are the primary source for numbers. Find the fee page and the contract specification for Bitcoin, and read what the minimum order size is. On Binance's USDⓈ-M futures the standard fee is 0.05% if your order fills straight away — about 25 cents on a 500 USDT trade, and the same again when you close. There is a lower rate (0.02%) if your order waits in the book, and the fees page explains when you get which.

If you want to feel the numbers rather than read them, put a few into a calculator and watch what happens when you change the move or the leverage:

03Week 2: reading a chart and writing one simple plan

Week two is where most free courses lose people by dumping twenty indicators on them. Skip all that. Learn what one candle on the chart means, what the thin wicks above and below it are, and which time interval you are looking at — then spend the rest of the week just watching Bitcoin on a one-hour chart for twenty minutes a day.

Use the chart inside the exchange app itself. It is free, it is the same screen you will trade on later, and you can open a Binance Futures account purely to look at the chart and the order window without funding anything. Mark on paper where the price would have to go for your idea to be wrong — that level is your future stop-loss, and finding it is the single most useful chart skill a beginner can build.

By the end of the week, write one plan for one trade and keep it to four lines: which coin, long or short, where you get out if you are wrong, where you take profit. That's it. One simple plan per trade will carry you further than a folder of indicator screenshots, and it costs nothing.

04Week 3: demo trading with a journal

Now you open a demo account and trade the plan with money that isn't real. Several big exchanges offer it, and there is a separate page on which exchanges have demo futures if you want to compare them. The practical route is to sign up on Bybit, switch to demo trading and place your first order there — check during sign-up that futures are available where you live.

Do roughly fifteen to twenty demo trades at the same size every time, and write every one down. The journal is the part that turns practice into learning, because without it you remember the wins and forget the rest.

1. Before you click

   Write the date, the coin, long or short, your entry, your stop price and your target. If you can't fill in the stop line, you don't have a trade yet.

2. After it closes

   Write the result in dollars and whether you closed it by plan, by stop, or by hand because you got nervous.

3. One honest line

   Add what you would do differently. After ten trades you will see your own repeating mistake, and nobody could have sold you that information.

Keep in mind that demo fills are kinder than real ones, and your heart rate is not the same when the money is yours. Treat demo as a place to learn the buttons and your own habits, not as proof of future profits.

05Which free sources you can trust

Three kinds of free material are genuinely reliable. The exchange's help centre and contract specifications are the primary facts — fees, funding times, minimum order sizes, how liquidation is calculated. The exchange's free learning section, usually linked from the site footer or the help menu, explains mechanics well, as long as you remember it is also marketing. And independent beginner guides, including this one, are useful when they show you the losing side of a trade as clearly as the winning side.

Be honest with yourself about the incentive behind anything you read, including our pages: the buttons here carry a referral identifier, and we may receive a reward from the exchange if you sign up. That does not change the mechanics we describe, but it is a fair thing to know. A source that never mentions how it earns money is not more neutral — it just hasn't told you.

06How to spot a paid mentor hiding behind free lessons

The usual funnel looks the same everywhere: a free video or webinar, then an invitation to a closed Telegram group, then a few days of friendly chat and profit screenshots, then the paid signals or the paid course. The free part is real, and it is often decent. It is simply bait, and knowing that lets you take the free part and leave the rest.

• Screenshots of profits, account balances or 90%-win-rate claims, with no losing trades ever shown.
• Urgency — a price that goes up tomorrow, 'only 10 seats left', a countdown timer.
• A promise of a specific income: dollars per day, percent per month, 'replace your salary'.
• Pressure to sign up on an exchange using their code and then immediately use high leverage.
• A request for your API keys, your login details, or money sent to them to trade for you.

Paid courses are not automatically bad. But before you pay for anything, ask what it gives you that the free path doesn't — and after three honest weeks you will usually find the answer is nothing you couldn't have read for free.

07What happens after the three weeks

By the end of week three you will know the vocabulary, you will be able to read a chart well enough to place a stop, and you will have a journal with your own mistakes in it. That is a better starting point than most people have when they put real money in. From there the next step is small and real: a tiny deposit, one coin, low leverage, one trade at a time, with the stop price written down before you open anything.

Learning sticks faster when the screen in front of you is the real one. Opening an account, looking at the order window and placing demo orders there costs nothing, and after that the words from week one stop being theory.