◆ How this was made
No guru. Just receipts.
CANDLEWORK is published anonymously and on purpose. Most trading education asks you to trust a person. This site asks you to trust the sources — and then links them so you can check.
Last reviewed · August 2026
Who publishes this
CANDLEWORK is an independent educational project, published under the project name rather than a personal one. There is no named instructor, no track record on display, and no claim of expertise you are asked to take on faith.
That is a deliberate design choice, not evasion. The trading-education industry runs on personal authority: a face, a screenshot of a winning account, a story about how much someone made. That model has a structural problem — you cannot verify any of it, and the person telling you has a financial reason to make it sound better than it is.
This site is built the opposite way. Every substantive claim points to a source outside this site — regulators, exchanges, academic literature — gathered on the Sources page. If a claim here is wrong, you can prove it without knowing anything about who wrote it.
What we promise
- Free, forever. No paywall, no course upsell.
- No ads and no sponsorships.
- No email wall — nothing here is gated behind a signup.
- No affiliate links to brokers, platforms, or trading products.
- No signals, no picks, no predictions, no win-rate claims.
- No account required. Your progress is stored in your own browser.
This matters more than a biography would. A named expert with a course to sell has a reason to overstate what patterns can do. We have nothing to sell you, which means there is no commercial incentive anywhere on this site to make trading sound easier or more profitable than it is. That is the whole reason we can afford to say things like "most of the popular methodology is unfalsifiable" in The Contested Room.
How it is funded
It isn't. CANDLEWORK costs a domain and static hosting, paid personally. There is no revenue, no investor, and no plan to monetise the educational content. If that ever changes — for example, if hosting costs required sponsorship — it would be disclosed on this page before anything appeared on the site.
How it is researched
Factual claims are drawn from primary and authoritative secondary sources: SEC and FINRA materials, exchange documentation, and published academic work on market microstructure. Where a figure is an estimate that varies by source or period, it is described that way in the text rather than presented as settled.
Where something is genuinely disputed — as much of the popular "smart money" methodology is — it is presented as claim, mechanism, and verdict, with the disagreement made visible instead of resolved for you. Full method on the Editorial standards page.
What this site is not
It is not financial advice, and it is not a substitute for a licensed professional. It contains no recommendations to buy, sell, or hold anything. Every interactive tool is a simulation, clearly labelled SIM, running on generated data — no live market data appears anywhere on this site.
▸ Trading carries a substantial risk of loss. Most active traders lose money. Nothing on this site should be treated as a strategy, a signal, or a reason to place a trade.
Contact & corrections
Found an error? Please report it — corrections are the mechanism that makes an anonymous, source-led site trustworthy, and we would rather be corrected than be wrong.
How we handle corrections is set out in the Editorial standards.