When you first start looking into it, financial trading can be confusing. You’re likely to hear a lot of jargon surrounding it, some fairly recognizable such as interest rate, broker, commodity, or dividend, and some you may never have heard before, such as a long strangle, EBITDA, or Ichimoku cloud.

However, beneath all the terminology, there’s one core principle that underpins financial trading: predicting whether something will go up in price, or down. Get it right and there’s an opportunity for great rewards. But get it wrong and you could lose a lot of money.