THE GLOSSARY
Terms, in plain English.
Every term the lessons teach, defined the way the lessons define it — no dictionary voice, no jargon loop. Each entry names the lesson that teaches it, so any term can take you straight to the full explanation.
A B C D E F I L M N O P R S T U V W Y
A
- Ask
- The lowest price a seller is willing to accept for a share. With the bid, it brackets every quote. Taught in: How a trade works →
B
- Bid
- The highest price a buyer is offering to pay for a share. Taught in: How a trade works →
- Borrow and recall
- The borrow is the loan of shares a short seller sells — arranged by the broker, ultimately out of other clients’ accounts — and its fee is a market price that can reprice overnight. A recall is the lender demanding those shares back: the borrow ends on the lender’s schedule, not the short’s, and the shares must be bought back and returned. Taught in: Short selling →
- Breadth
- How many stocks participate in a move. Breadth tells you whether a move is a crowd or a committee. Taught in: Sectors and breadth →
C
- Call option
- The right to buy at a set price (the strike) by a set date. You buy the right; the obligation is the other side's. Taught in: Options: the rights vehicle →
- Candle body and wicks
- A candlestick encodes open, high, low and close: the body spans open-to-close, the wicks reach the extremes. Long bodies are often read as conviction, and long wicks as moves that were probed and rejected — both are interpretations; the candle itself records only the four prices. Taught in: Candlesticks →
- Candlestick
- A one-period picture of price — open, high, low and close in a single shape. Its color is just direction for that period, always relative to the timeframe. Taught in: Candlesticks →
- Cap-weighted index
- An index where each company counts in proportion to its size, so the biggest companies steer it. Taught in: Indexes explained →
- Commodity
- A physical good — oil, wheat, gold — priced by physical facts: supply, weather, storage. Grades and units are standardized (a barrel, a bushel, an ounce), and that sameness is what makes it tradable. Taught in: Commodities: the goods themselves →
- Compounding
- What happens when gains join the base and earn gains of their own: $10,000 growing at 8% a year for thirty years becomes about $100,600. Its inputs are the rate and time — and it only runs on capital that survives. Taught in: Compounding and drawdown →
- Counterparty
- The other side of your trade. There is always one — the exchange matches orders automatically. Taught in: How a trade works →
D
- Daily settlement
- In futures, gains and losses settle in cash every day. The account tells the truth nightly. Taught in: Futures: the contract vehicle →
- Delivery
- Actually receiving the physical good behind a commodity contract. Almost nobody takes delivery; these markets are reached through futures. Taught in: Commodities: the goods themselves →
- Delta
- An option’s share-equivalent exposure: a call with a delta of 0.40 moves about forty cents per dollar of the stock, like owning 40 shares. Delta moves as price does — a reading to re-take, not a fact to file. Taught in: Options in depth →
- Dividend
- Cash a company may pay out to its shareholders. Many growing companies pay none. Taught in: What a stock actually is →
- Dollar-cost averaging
- Investing a fixed amount at fixed intervals, whatever the price: more shares when cheap, fewer when dear, and no monthly decision to get wrong. The paycheck’s native method. Taught in: Retirement accounts and the long game →
- Drawdown
- The fall from an account’s — or an asset’s — peak to its valley, measured as a percent of the peak. A drawdown charges twice: the recovery it demands (a 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain) and the toll it takes on the operator earning that recovery. Taught in: Compounding and drawdown →
- Duration
- A bond’s effective center of gravity, in years: it weighs every payment by when it arrives, where maturity only states when the last one does. In the form traders use (modified duration) it is also the approximate percentage the price moves for each one-point move in yield — a ten-year bond paying a 5% coupon has a duration near 8, so one point of yield is worth roughly 8% of price. Taught in: Bonds and rates →
E
- Equal-weighted index
- An index where every company counts the same — one vote each, regardless of size. Taught in: Indexes explained →
- EV/EBITDA
- Enterprise value divided by EBITDA. Enterprise value is market capitalization plus net debt — the price of the whole business, borrowings included. EBITDA is earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization: a whole-business earnings measure, stated before interest because it belongs to lenders and owners together. The direction is the definition — the whole-business price on top, a whole-business earnings measure beneath it — which is what lets the multiple compare companies carrying very different amounts of debt. Written the other way up, it is a different measure — a rough earnings yield — not the multiple. Taught in: Financial statements II →
- Expiry
- The date a contract ends. Every futures and options contract has one; a stock never does. Taught in: Futures: the contract vehicle →
F
- Free cash flow
- What a business generates after paying to maintain and grow itself: operating cash flow minus capital expenditure. The owner’s bottom line — profits that arrived as cash. Taught in: Financial statements II →
- Futures contract
- An agreement about a price at a date: exposure without ownership — no shares, no votes, no dividends. Taught in: Futures: the contract vehicle →
I
- Implied volatility
- The movement options are pricing in, backed out of their premiums: an insurance charge for the unknown, quoted as an annualized percent. It rises into events and collapses after them — the crush. Taught in: Volatility →
- Index
- A list of stocks plus a calculation. The level is a summary, not a price — nobody can own an index; you own a fund that tracks it. Taught in: Indexes explained →
- Index fund
- A fund that tracks an index, holding the basket so you do not have to buy every name yourself. Taught in: Indexes explained →
- Investing
- Aiming to profit from a business's growth over years. It demands patience and discipline. Taught in: Trading versus investing →
L
- Limit order
- An order that names your price and waits. It fills at that price or better — or not at all. Taught in: How a trade works →
M
- Margin (futures)
- A good-faith deposit, a small fraction of a futures contract's value. It is not a down payment, and it is not your maximum loss. Taught in: Futures: the contract vehicle →
- Market capitalization
- Share price times shares outstanding — the market's valuation of the company's equity. The share price alone says nothing about size. Taught in: Market capitalization →
- Market order
- An order that takes the current available price immediately. Taught in: How a trade works →
- Market structure (regime)
- The market's current pattern: an uptrend's staircase, a downtrend's inverted staircase, or a range's hallway. Structure describes the present regime; it never predicts the next one. Taught in: Market structure →
- Moving average
- The mean of the last N closes, recalculated each period. It always lags by construction, and it holds no new information — it is derived from price. Taught in: Moving averages →
N
- Net debt
- A company’s borrowings — short-term debt plus long-term debt — minus its cash and cash equivalents: what would still be owed if every dollar of cash went to the lenders today. When the cash is the bigger number, the answer runs the other way and the company holds net cash instead of debt. Taught in: Financial statements II →
O
- Order stack (book)
- The standing orders waiting on each side of a market. Its depth decides how far one wave of orders pushes the price. Taught in: What moves a price →
P
- P/E multiple
- The price compared to earnings per share. Multiples differ because growth expectations and risk differ — a multiple records beliefs, not facts. It is a description, never a verdict. Taught in: How to value a stock →
- Position sizing
- Deciding how much of your account a single position takes. In the stock vehicle, it is the driver's main control. Taught in: Position sizing →
- Priced in
- Expected news is already reflected in the price, so when it lands it often moves nothing. News moves prices through reactions, not through the news itself. Taught in: What moves a price →
- Put option
- The right to sell at a set price (the strike) by a set date. You buy the right; the obligation is the other side's. Taught in: Options: the rights vehicle →
R
- Range (hallway)
- A market moving sideways between levels. Staircase (trend) logic fails inside a hallway — and hallway logic fails on a staircase. Taught in: Market structure →
- Rebalancing
- Restoring a portfolio’s target weights on a schedule or a drift band — selling the overweight bucket, adding to the underweight. The mechanical sell-high/buy-low, run by a calendar instead of a forecast. Taught in: Portfolio construction →
- Resistance
- An area where price has repeatedly turned down — memory made visible. Think in zones, not exact lines — a zone is as wide as the area where price actually turned, never a fixed percentage. Taught in: Support and resistance →
S
- Screened list
- The journal’s daily shortlist: the names that passed the desk’s standing screens that morning, printed with the prior close’s numbers. In the Pro edition, the starred row is the screeners’ pick of the list. A screening is raw material for the reader’s own filters — never a recommendation. Taught in: Anatomy of an edition →
- Sector
- One of the market's neighborhoods: companies that share economic weather and tend to move as groups. Taught in: Sectors and breadth →
- Short squeeze
- The covering of crowded shorts becoming its own buying pressure: a rising price forces exits, the exits bid the price higher, and the loop feeds itself. Short interest measures the fuel. Taught in: Short selling →
- Spread
- The gap between the bid and the ask. An order that fills at once crosses it; a resting order waits on its own side of it. Taught in: How a trade works →
- Stop level
- The price level at which a trade idea is proven wrong and the position is exited. In this journal’s method it is read off the chart — a daily close through the level — set before the entry, and never moved further away. The level is the trigger, not a guaranteed fill: the exit executes at the next available price, which a gap can carry beyond the level. Taught in: Stops and exits →
- Strike price
- The set price inside an option contract — where a call's right to buy, or a put's right to sell, is fixed. One of an option's two dials; the other is its date. Taught in: Options: the rights vehicle →
- Support
- An area where price has repeatedly turned up — memory made visible. Think in zones, not exact lines — a zone is as wide as the area where price actually turned, never a fixed percentage. Taught in: Support and resistance →
T
- Time decay
- The steady loss of an option's time value as its date approaches. It decays standing still, weekends included — the honest price of an option's leverage. Taught in: Options: the rights vehicle →
- Trading
- Aiming to profit from price movement over horizons shorter than long-term investing — within a session (day trading), days to a few weeks (swing), or weeks to months (position). It demands attention and comfort with frequent small losses. Taught in: Trading versus investing →
U
- Uptrend (staircase)
- A sequence of higher highs and higher lows. A downtrend inverts the staircase. Taught in: Market structure →
V
- Valuation
- The work of asking what a claim on a business's future cash is worth today. Taught in: How to value a stock →
- Vehicle
- The form a market view rides in — stock, futures, options, commodities. The vehicle is a decision, and it comes first: every vehicle charges rent in a different currency — money, time, or attention. Taught in: Pick your vehicle →
- Vesting
- The schedule on which an employer’s contributions become yours. Your own contributions are always entirely yours; the employer’s commonly vest on a cliff — all of it at, say, three years of service — or in graded steps, and leaving before a milestone forfeits the unvested part. Taught in: Retirement accounts and the long game →
- Volatility
- How much a price moves, quoted as a number: realized volatility is the record of what actually moved; implied volatility is what options charge for what might. High volatility means wide ranges, dear premium, and — by the sizing formula — smaller positions. Taught in: Volatility →
W
- Watchlist
- A short personal list of names being prepared for, not owned: filtered from the Screened list by the reader’s vehicle, plan arithmetic, and levels they can state in one sentence. Watching is preparation, not ownership. Taught in: Building your watchlist →
Y
- Yield to maturity
- The full accounting on a bond: the annualized return if you buy at today’s price, collect every coupon, and are repaid the face value at the end — coupons plus the slow pull of a discounted price back up to par, or a premium price down to it. Current yield counts only the coupons; yield to maturity counts everything — and it is a held-to-maturity figure, not a promise: sell earlier, and the see-saw, not the schedule, decides your return. Taught in: Bonds and rates →
Definitions follow the education path's own wording. For research and education purposes only. Not financial advice.