Economics, Macro, Personal finance and the Library

This guide covers the Library, the app's shelf of books, and the three Trenches courses that are not about one market: Economics, Macro and Personal finance. After reading it, you can pick a course, switch courses without losing anything, and read the Library in the right order.

New to the app? Each course is one road of short lessons called levels, grouped into units and sections, as How lessons work: the road, energy and paper cash explains. Most lessons named here open only once your road reaches them.

Economics: how does a market set a price?

Economics is about how markets work: why people trade, why a market shows two prices, and how crowds and auctions set a price. It starts from zero, for a complete beginner, and climbs to advanced material.

Why two prices? The bid is the price buyers offer, and the ask is the price sellers want. Say the best bid is $0.99 and the best ask $1.01. Buying and then selling at once costs you the 2-cent gap: the spread.

It has four sections. Each unit teaches its own new words.

1. How markets work (beginner): supply and demand, bid, ask and the spread, market orders (trade now) and limit orders (trade only at your price or better), the order book.
2. Liquidity, information and the spread (intermediate): liquidity (how easily you can trade without moving the price much), measuring the spread, who started a trade, price impact, The dealer's dilemma.
3. Venues, speed and order flow (advanced): many venues, what liquidity is worth, algorithms, speed, the order flow inside a candle (one bar on a price chart).
4. Beliefs, crowds and auctions (advanced): herds, bubbles, the two auction units, and a final unit where you design a market.

Pax, the economics capybara, teaches every unit. Things change hands, the first level, uses an apple stall and a ticket resale app. Its point: a market is any set of rules that lets things change owners.

Read the ladder starts the unit "The order book": asks above, bids below, and how much is offered at each price. Why a coin has a price, and why thin coins slip uses the same ideas on memecoins.

Macro: what moves the whole economy?

Easy to mix up: Economics and Macro. Economics looks inside a market: who trades, and at what price. Macro looks at a whole economy and the news that moves markets: growth, prices, jobs and interest rates.

Macro fits anyone who hears "recession" or "rate decision" and wants to know what it means. Its own sections lean on charts and examples, with at most two calculations a unit.

It has five sections. Four are its own:

1. The economy in plain words (beginner): GDP (the value of what a country makes each year or quarter), the business cycle, jobs, productivity, early signals.
2. Prices, money and central banks (beginner): the CPI (the cost of a basket of everyday buys), inflation, money and banks, interest rates, central banks (which set a country's main interest rate), QE and QT (a central bank growing or shrinking its pile of bonds, loans investors can buy).
3. Government, trade and the world (intermediate): spending, taxes and debt without political takes, trade, exchange rates, shocks and crises.
4. Markets and the macro clock (intermediate): bonds and their yields (the yearly return a bond pays), the yield curve, how each market feels the economy, your first macro week.

The fifth, Macro regimes, catalysts and event replay, is shared with the Crypto, Stocks and Forex roads. A level you finish there counts on all of them. It covers risk on and risk off (when traders reach for risk or back away), release days, and rumors and fakes. Its event replays show a past chart one step at a time.

Nori, the macro lynx, leads the course. Your spending is someone's income starts it: you pay the baker, and the baker pays the miller. What a central bank is uses a thermostat to show why a rate change takes time. Yields by maturity reads a yield curve, which lines up yields from the shortest loan to the longest.

Personal finance: how do you manage your own money?

Personal finance is about your own money: spending, borrowing, saving, protecting it and planning. It fits anyone, from a first budget to a full money plan.

It has five sections:

1. Money in, money out (beginner): tracking a month, your paycheck, a budget, timing bills, the emergency fund (money kept apart for real emergencies).
2. Borrowing, credit and debt (beginner): what a loan costs, credit cards, credit scores, getting out of debt, "Borrowed money and trading".
3. Saving, growing and inflation (intermediate): compounding (growth on earlier growth), inflation, stocks, bonds and cash, index funds (funds that hold everything in a market index), fees.
4. Protecting what you have (intermediate): insurance, spotting scams, locking your accounts, big purchases.
5. Your money plan (advanced): retirement accounts, money brain traps, goals, "Your trading money: a separate pot", and a final unit that builds a money plan for an example household.

Tess, the planner tortoise, leads the course. Money in, money out, the first level, sees a month as two lists: what came in and what went out.

Two units speak to trading. The level Margin is a loan starts "Borrowed money and trading" with an ad that says "trade with 10 times your money." The unit shows the extra is a loan, so a loss can be bigger than what you put in.

Say you put in $1,000 and borrow $1,000 more to buy $2,000 of shares. If the shares drop to $800 in total, selling them does not even repay the loan. Your $1,000 is gone, and you still owe $200.

On a Trenches ticket, Margin means your own paper cash set aside for a trade, not a loan.

The level Trading money is money you can lose starts "Your trading money: a separate pot". The pot is a small amount you can afford to lose. Rent and bill money stay out of it, and an emergency fund and paying down costly debt come first. The pot also gets a loss limit per trade and per month.

How do you switch courses?

On a computer:

1. Click the Rating chip, the first of the four chips at the top of the Learn page.
2. My courses opens, with a tile for each course and the Library. Personal finance's tile says Finance.
3. Click a tile to switch, or the Library tile to open it.

The Map button on the unit banner opens the course map, which shows your progress and switches courses too.

On a phone:

1. Tap Rating, the chip with your Trencher avatar at the top of the road.
2. My courses shows the courses you have added. Tap one to switch.
3. The last tile, Course, opens the Courses page. Tap any course there, the Library included, to open it and add it to My courses.

Every course keeps its own progress. Switching resets nothing, and each course remembers the section and unit you were on.

The Library: which book comes first?

On a computer, the Library sits in the left sidebar and in My courses. On a phone, open it from the Courses page. Read it in this order:

1. From Zero to Trader, Volume I, Beginner. It is always open, and all three volumes are free for everyone.
2. Pass the Volume I quiz to open Volume II, Intermediate: 10 questions, 8 right to pass. Volume II's page has a Take the Volume I quiz button. The quiz costs no energy, the daily allowance lesson questions use, and pays no paper cash, the app's practice money. You can retry right away with new questions.
3. Pass the Volume II quiz to open Volume III, Advanced.
4. Elite, the paid membership, adds the nine Trenches Originals, which Trenches wrote, and companion books, guides to well-known books. Each Original also needs its road lessons, listed on its page under "Earn it in the lessons." Even with Elite, an Original opens only after them.

On a computer, the Library opens on your next book, marked Continue reading once you have started. The book remembers your page, but only on the device you read on.

On a phone, a volume's page also offers "Or walk the road: the same lessons, one chapter at a time." Each lesson there ends with a Quick quiz: 1 energy to answer, and retrying is free.

With an account, a finished Library lesson adds 20 points to your weekly league, once, and pays no paper cash. Battles, Ranks and the weekly leagues explains the points.