About Kxianbi
This notebook is written for anyone sitting in front of a screen full of red and green for the first time.
Plenty of beginners open the price page, see a wall of candles, a few coloured lines, and some little windows with bars hanging underneath — and can't make sense of a single thing. The guides out there are either "a candle is just a candlestick", which tells you nothing, or they open with "MACD bullish divergence with a Bollinger squeeze" and scare you straight off.
Reading a chart isn't actually that hard. It just rarely gets laid out in an order a beginner can follow. That's what this notebook does.
What we do, and what we don't
What we do: take the ideas that trip beginners up and explain them one at a time in plain words — green and red, body and wicks, moving averages, order types, right through to how to actually do things on the exchange screen. Anything to do with the exchange screen is checked against the exchange's public help pages, and updated when the interface changes.
What we don't: we don't make calls, we don't post "signals", we don't predict that some coin is going up or down, we don't sell courses, and we don't run paid groups. We hold to one idea: reading a chart is for making fewer mistakes and knowing what you're betting on, not for fortune-telling. Anyone who claims they can reliably predict prices deserves your suspicion — we wrote that down in Why candles can't predict the future, and we hold ourselves to it too.
About "Chen Zhu" and the desk
Articles carry the byline "lead writer, Chen Zhu". That's a pen name our small editorial desk writes under — not a real-life expert. We're not licensed analysts, and we don't pretend to be. The desk picks the topics, writes them up and checks them against official pages, trying to spell out exactly where beginners get stuck. If you spot anything we've got wrong, write in — we'll fix it in the open on the corrections log.
How we make money (full disclosure)
Laying this out plainly is, to us, simply the right thing to do.
The site is free. We keep it going through exchange referrals. The "Practice on OKX"-style links you'll see in articles carry our invite codes — OK3188 for an exchange account, and OKX0211 for the OKX Web3 Wallet. If you sign up or use OKX through these links, you pay the same standard fees.
A few things you should know:
- The fee is paid by the exchange and adds nothing to your cost — your trading fees don't go up because of it.
- Using our invite code is entirely your choice. You're perfectly free to go straight to the exchange's own site and sign up there.
- We point to OKX because its charting is fairly complete and it has a free demo account, which suits beginners practising on charts — but it is not the only option. Crypto trading carries risk, and which platform you use is a call you should make for yourself.
- This referral arrangement doesn't shape the angle of what we write. We flag the risks we'd flag anyway, and we're just as straight about the limits of technical analysis.
We aren't OKX, we aren't affiliated with it or acting as its agent, and we don't use its official branding. The only relationship is the referral arrangement described above: when you sign up with our invite code, we earn a referral commission. Beyond that, we're just an independent, third-party information site.
Finding us
Questions, corrections or suggestions — write to [email protected], or see Contact. We reply to as many as we can get through.
Crypto swings hard, and contracts and leverage can wipe out your capital entirely. Everything on this site is chart-reading education, not investment advice. Only use money you can afford to lose.