Reading the Sky Trade terminal: a guided tour of every panel

The Sky Trade terminal puts everything needed for a Higher/Lower trade on one screen: an instrument, a chart, an amount, a time, and two buttons. The rest is there to help you read the chart and keep track of what you have done. This tour goes through each part in the order you would use it, and ends with a full trade placed from the keyboard.

Demo or real: check this first

Every account has two balances: a demo account with $10,000 of virtual money and a real account. Which one is active is the first thing worth checking before any trade. Prices, charts and payouts are identical on both, so the screen looks the same either way; only the balance tells you which money is on the line.

The demo can be reset to $10,000 with the ↻ button, as long as no demo trades are open. If you are on the guest demo without registering, you can trade, but history, wallet, profile and other sections will ask you to register.

The instrument picker

The picker lists the 59 instruments: 21 market forex pairs with real quotes and 38 OTC instruments, whose prices are generated by Sky Trade's server and do not follow any real market. Each instrument shows its current payout percentage before you trade.

Things worth knowing:

• Payouts range from 20% to 94% and drift slowly over time. Market pairs top out at 92%.
• Two OTC instruments hold the maximum 94% at any moment, and these leaders rotate every 25 minutes.
• All crypto and both indices are OTC-only. "BTC/USD OTC" does not follow the real Bitcoin price.
• A market pair can be unavailable with the message "market for this pair is closed". That happens when no fresh real quote has arrived for 2 minutes: at weekends, on holidays or during a feed outage.

The difference between the two kinds of instrument matters more than anything else on this screen; it is explained in OTC explained.

The chart

The chart shows the same server prices on every device, so what you see is what the server uses to settle trades.

Timeframes: S5, S10, S15, S30, M1, M2, M3, M5, M10, M15, M30, H1, H4, D1. The letter is the unit (seconds, minutes, hours, day), and the number is the length of each candle. See timeframes explained.

Chart types: Line, Candles, Bars and Heikin Ashi. Candles are the usual choice; candlestick chart basics covers how to read them. Heikin Ashi smooths candles using averaged values, so its candles do not show the exact prices at which a trade would be settled.

Indicators: 29 in total. Trend tools include SMA, EMA, WMA, Bollinger Bands, Donchian, Keltner, Alligator, Ichimoku, Parabolic SAR, SuperTrend, Hull MA, DEMA and TEMA. Oscillators include RSI, MACD, Stochastic, CCI, Williams %R, ATR, Momentum, Awesome Oscillator, ADX, ROC, TRIX, CMO, Aroon, Vortex, DeMarker and Ultimate Oscillator. Every one of them produces false signals; more indicators on the screen usually means more contradictions, not more certainty.

Drawing tools: trend line, ray, horizontal level, vertical line, rectangle and Fibonacci.

There is no volume indicator because the price feed contains prices only, with no traded volume.

Amount and time

Amount. The stake for the next trade, from $1 to $50,000 by default. It is also your maximum loss on that trade. Balances are stored in US dollars, but you can display amounts in USD, EUR, UAH, RUB, KZT, BRL, INR, PLN, TRY or GBP.

Time. The expiry, from 5 seconds to 4 hours, with presets 5s, 10s, 15s, 30s, 1m, 2m, 3m, 5m, 10m, 15m, 30m, 45m, 1h, 2h and 4h. On market pairs the minimum is 30 seconds. You can set it by duration or by clock time ("close at"). The difference is explained in how Higher/Lower trades work.

Buy and Sell

Two buttons: Buy (green, ↑) if you expect the price to finish above the entry price at expiry, Sell (red, ↓) if below. The server opens the trade at its own price and time and locks in the payout shown at that moment. You can have up to 20 open trades at once.

Pending orders also exist, but they run in your browser: they trigger only while the terminal tab is open. Close the tab and a pending order will not fire.

Open trades and history

Running trades are listed as open trades until they expire. After expiry, a trade's result appears in your history: win, loss, or tie with the stake refunded. History is the raw material for your trading journal; reviewing it weekly is more useful than any indicator.

Settings

The settings let you adjust:

• sound;
• crosshair on the chart;
• clock and time zone;
• candle timer, showing how long until the current candle closes;
• themes;
• confirmation for large trades;
• a warning when the payout changes.

Hotkeys

Hotkeys open trades instantly, so they are as useful for speed as they are dangerous for impulsive clicking. If you tend to click on impulse, leave them alone until you have a written plan.

Worked example: one trade from start to finish

1. Check the balance switch: demo.
2. Open the picker and select EUR/USD. The payout shows 88%.
3. Set the chart to M1 candles and add an EMA from the indicators list.
4. Set the amount to $100, which is 1% of the $10,000 demo.
5. Set the time to 3m by duration.
6. Your setup appears: price pulls back to the EMA in an uptrend. You press W.
7. The trade appears among your open trades and runs for 3 minutes. At expiry the price is above entry: the trade closes as a win, and $188 returns to the balance, $100 stake plus $88 profit.

Had the price finished below entry, the $100 would have been lost. At 88% payout you need to win about 53.2% of trades just to break even.