Levels first, narrative second
Weekly and daily structure gets marked before the week opens. News gives me a reason to be at a level — never a reason to create one.
$ whoami
Max Forex — gold, read slowly.
I trade one instrument: spot gold. Not because it is easy — because it is the only market I have watched closely enough to stop guessing at it. This desk runs out of Kigali, Rwanda, on a two-screen setup and a written plan that gets reviewed every Sunday.
- Instrument
- XAUUSD only
- Base
- Kigali, Rwanda
- Session
- London open → NY close
- Style
- Intraday, 1–3 positions
- Teaching
- Small groups, Kigali
$ scroll to continue
$ cat basics/00-start-here.md
New to forex? Start here
Everything on this page is the free part. Read it before you open a demo account — it will save you the two or three hundred dollars most beginners lose learning the same four things the hard way.
Forex just means exchanging one currency for another. Prices are always quoted in pairs — EURUSD at 1.0850 means one euro buys 1.0850 dollars. You never buy "the euro" on its own; you always buy it against something else. Gold is quoted the same way, as XAUUSD: the price of one troy ounce of gold in US dollars. When XAUUSD moves from 2,340 to 2,352, that is twelve dollars of movement on one ounce.
The reason people trade it instead of just holding it is leverage. A broker will let you control a much larger position than the money in your account. That cuts both ways, and it is the single most common reason a beginner's account does not survive its first month. The rest of this page is mostly about that problem.
$ the six words you need first
- Pip
- The smallest standard move in a currency pair — 0.0001 on most pairs. On gold, people usually talk in dollars per ounce instead, because a "pip" on XAUUSD is a tenth of a cent and it gets confusing fast.
- Lot
- The size of your position. One standard lot on gold is 100 ounces. Most beginners should be trading 0.01 lots (one ounce) while they learn, and that is not a joke or a warm-up — it is the correct size for an account under a thousand dollars.
- Spread
- The gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at. It is the broker's fee, charged the moment you open. On gold, a good broker in our region runs 20–35 cents; anything above 50 cents is eating your account quietly.
- Leverage
- Borrowed size. 1:100 means $100 of your money controls $10,000 of gold. It does not increase your edge — it only increases how fast you find out whether you have one.
- Margin
- The deposit your broker holds while a position is open. If your losses eat into it past a set level, the broker closes your trade for you. That is a margin call, and it is not a rescue — it is the broker protecting itself, not you.
- Stop loss
- A pre-set exit that closes the trade at a loss you chose in advance. It is the only part of trading that is fully under your control. Every trade you take should have one before it is open, not after.
$ why I trade gold and not the majors
Gold is not a currency pair, and it does not behave like one. It has no interest rate, no central bank, no earnings. It moves on fear, on real yields, and on whether large institutions want to be holding something that is not a promise from a government. That makes it trend harder than EURUSD and reverse more violently, which suits a trader who is willing to sit still and wait.
It also has one practical advantage for anyone trading from East Africa: gold's biggest moves happen during the London and New York sessions, and Rwanda runs on CAT (UTC+2). The London open lands at 10:00 in the morning here. You do not have to wake up at three in the morning to trade the best hours of the day.
$ the four mistakes that empty beginner accounts
- Position size chosen by feeling. Most beginners pick a lot size because it "looks about right" and then discover the stop distance means they were risking a fifth of the account on one trade. Size comes from the stop, never the other way round.
- No stop loss, or a stop moved to avoid being wrong. Moving a stop further away turns a small planned loss into an account-threatening one. If the reason you entered is gone, the trade is gone.
- Trading the quiet hours. Gold between 02:00 and 07:00 Kigali is thin. Spreads widen, moves are small and erratic, and stops get taken out by nothing. There is no shame in being flat.
- Adding to a losing trade. Averaging down feels like conviction and is usually just refusing to accept a small loss. It works until the one time it does not, and that one time ends the account.
$ a worked example, in real numbers
Say your account holds $500 and you want to risk 1% on a gold trade — that is $5. You have marked your entry at 2,340 and your stop at 2,332, so the stop distance is 8 dollars per ounce. Divide the risk by the distance: 5 ÷ 8 = 0.625 ounces. That is your size, roughly 0.006 lots. Most platforms will let you trade 0.01, which risks $8 instead of $5 — close enough to start, and you now know exactly what you are risking before you click.
Notice what did not happen in that calculation. Nobody asked how confident you felt. Confidence is not an input. The stop distance and the account balance are the only two numbers that matter, and both of them are known before the trade.
$ demo first, and mean it
Open a demo account and trade it for at least sixty sessions before you fund a live one. Not to prove you can make money — to find out what you do when you are down three trades in a row. That is the part that costs real money to learn.
$ cat method.md
How the desk actually runs
Gold is not a currency pair. It behaves like a fear gauge with a bid underneath it, and most of the retail accounts that blow up on it are trading it as if it were EURUSD with a wider spread. My whole method is built around that one difference.
I trade the London open and the first two hours of New York. Outside those windows I am flat. The Asian session on gold is thin and stop-hunty, and I have paid for that lesson more than once — most memorably in March 2023, when a 40-minute wick through the Tokyo range took out a position that had been green for six hours.
Every trade gets a written reason before it gets a lot size. If I cannot write the reason in one sentence, there is no trade. That rule alone has done more for the account than any indicator I have ever paid for.
Fixed risk, variable size
Risk is 0.5% of equity per position, 1.5% maximum across correlated exposure. Size is calculated from the stop distance, never chosen by feel.
One instrument, no rotation
No indices, no crypto, no oil. Every hour of screen time goes into gold's behaviour around the same handful of price zones.
Journal before ego
Every entry, exit and skipped setup is logged with a screenshot. Sunday review decides whether the week's losses were process errors or just variance.
$ ls sessions/
The trading day, in Kigali time
Rwanda runs on CAT (UTC+2), which lines up almost perfectly with the London session. That is a genuine advantage and I do not waste it.
| Window | Kigali time | What I do |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-market prep | 06:30 – 08:00 | Mark levels, check the economic calendar, write the day's bias. No orders yet. |
| London open | 10:00 – 12:30 | Primary window. Liquidity arrives, the day's range usually gets set here. |
| Midday lull | 12:30 – 15:30 | Flat. Range compression, nothing worth paying spread for. |
| New York open | 15:30 – 18:00 | Second window. US data drops, continuation or reversal of the London move. |
| Review | 18:00 – 19:00 | Journal every fill, tag the mistakes, close the terminal. |
| Weekend | Sunday, 16:00 | Weekly review, plan the coming week's zones, adjust risk if the drawdown calls for it. |
$ cat risk.txt
The numbers I hold myself to
These are the rules, not a performance claim. Anyone can show a good month; the point is having a written line you do not cross when the month is bad.
- 0.5%Risk per position
- 1.5%Maximum daily loss
- 3Positions per day, cap
- 1:2Minimum reward-to-risk accepted
- 6%Monthly drawdown that stops trading
- 1Instrument traded
Nothing here is a promise of returns. Trading gold with leverage can lose money faster than most people expect, and past results on any desk say very little about the next six months.
$ ls services/
Ways to work with the desk
Session notes
A short written note before each window: the levels I am watching, the bias, and what would invalidate it. Sent by email, no signals, no lot sizes.
One-to-one review
You bring your last twenty trades and your journal. We go through them line by line and find where the process broke — usually it is sizing, not entries.
Risk framework setup
We write your position-sizing rules, your daily loss limit and your review routine, then test them against your own history before you trade them live.
Broker & platform questions
Spreads on gold vary wildly between brokers in the region. If you are choosing one, I will tell you what to look at and what to ignore.
$ ./register --student
Register as a student
Two intakes a month, eight students per intake, so that everyone gets their own charts looked at. Fill this in and I will email you the next start date, the syllabus and the fee — no payment is taken here.
$ ./contact --send
Say something
Tell me what you trade and what you are stuck on. I read everything and reply within a day or two — usually in the evening after the New York close.
$ desk hours — Mon to Fri, 06:30 to 19:00 CAT
$ based in Kigali, Rwanda · remote everywhere