Stock & Crypto Trading Glossary

About This Glossary

This glossary covers both stock-market and crypto terminology in one alphabetical list, since most traders on this site work across both. Definitions here are intentionally short — for a term with a dedicated guide on Swoopr Trade, the entry ends with a "Full guide →" link to the fuller explanation, worked examples, and formulas. Terms without a linked guide still get a complete, standalone definition.

This page is educational and informational only. It is not personalized investment, financial, legal, or tax advice, and no entry recommends buying, selling, or holding any specific security, cryptocurrency, or protocol.

Search Terms

#

10-K: An annual report that U.S. public companies must file with the SEC, covering audited financial statements, business description, risk factors, and management discussion.
10-Q: A quarterly report that U.S. public companies must file with the SEC, covering unaudited financial statements and material developments since the last annual report.

A

Accredited Investor: An individual or entity that meets SEC-defined income, net worth, or professional criteria, qualifying them to invest in certain private securities offerings not registered for the general public.
After-Hours Trading: Trading that takes place after a stock exchange's regular session closes, typically with lower volume and wider spreads than the regular session.
Airdrop: A distribution of crypto tokens directly to wallet addresses, often used to reward past users, bootstrap a new protocol, or promote a project.
Altcoin: An informal term for any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. Full guide →
Anchoring: The tendency to weight an initial reference point, like a purchase price or recent high, too heavily when judging whether a current price is fair. Full guide →
ATR (Average True Range): A volatility indicator that measures the average size of a security's price range over a set number of periods, without indicating direction.

B

Backtest: A simulation of a trading strategy's rules against historical price data to estimate how it would have performed. Full guide →
Bear Market: An extended period of falling prices in a market or asset, commonly defined as a decline of 20% or more from a recent high.
Bid-Ask Spread: The difference between the highest price a buyer is willing to pay (bid) and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept (ask); a narrower spread generally signals a more liquid market.
Bitcoin: The first and largest cryptocurrency, using Proof of Work consensus and a fixed maximum supply of 21 million coins. Full guide →
Blockchain: A distributed, cryptographically linked record of transactions maintained across many computers according to a network's consensus rules, rather than a single central database.
Blockchain Explorer: A website or tool that lets anyone look up transactions, addresses, and blocks recorded on a public blockchain.
Blue Chip Stock: Stock of a large, well-established, financially stable company, typically with a long operating history and a reputation for reliability.
Bollinger Bands: A volatility indicator consisting of a moving average with upper and lower bands set a number of standard deviations away, which widen and narrow as volatility changes.
Borrow Fee: The cost a broker charges to lend out shares for a short sale, which rises when a stock is hard to borrow. Full guide →
Bull Market: An extended period of rising prices in a market or asset, generally associated with investor optimism.
Buyback (Share Repurchase): A company's purchase of its own outstanding shares on the open market, which reduces share count and can increase per-share metrics like EPS.

C

Candlestick Chart: A price chart style where each candle shows a period's open, high, low, and close, with the body colored to indicate whether the close was higher or lower than the open.
Capital Gain / Capital Loss: The profit or loss realized when an asset is sold for more (capital gain) or less (capital loss) than its cost basis; each is typically taxed differently depending on how long the asset was held.
Centralized Exchange (CEX): A company-operated crypto trading platform that maintains customer accounts and typically holds the private keys to deposited assets on customers' behalf. Full guide →
Chart Pattern: A recognizable price shape on a chart — such as a head and shoulders, triangle, or flag — that traders use to anticipate a continuation or reversal of the existing trend. Full guide →
Circuit Breaker: An exchange-wide trading pause triggered automatically when a broad market index falls by a defined percentage within a session, intended to curb panic selling.
Circulating Supply: The estimated number of a token's units currently available in the market, excluding units that are locked, unissued, or otherwise restricted. Full guide →
Closing Auction: A batch auction that determines a stock's official closing price by matching accumulated buy and sell orders at a single point in time at the end of the trading session.
Coin: A crypto asset that is native to and operates on its own blockchain, as distinct from a token built on top of an existing network.
Coins vs. Tokens: Coins are native assets of their own blockchain, like Bitcoin or Ether; tokens are created and managed through a smart contract or protocol running on top of an existing blockchain. Full guide →
Cold Storage: Keeping crypto private keys or signing devices completely offline to reduce exposure to remote hacking and malware.
Cold Wallet: A crypto wallet kept offline, such as a hardware device or paper backup, reducing exposure to remote hacking at the cost of slower access for transactions. Full guide →
Confirmation Bias: The tendency to notice and favor information that supports an existing position or belief while discounting evidence against it. Full guide →
Consensus Mechanism: The rules a blockchain network uses to agree on which transactions and which version of the transaction history are valid, such as Proof of Work or Proof of Stake.
Cost Basis: The original value of an asset for tax purposes, usually the purchase price plus certain fees, used to calculate capital gain or loss when the asset is sold.
Counterparty Risk (Crypto): The risk that another party in a transaction or arrangement — an exchange, lender, issuer, or protocol — fails to meet its obligations, independent of what happens to the underlying asset's price. Full guide →
Crypto Arbitrage: Profiting from a temporary price difference for the same asset across two markets or exchanges, typically by buying low on one and selling high on the other. Full guide →
Crypto Bridge: A system that moves assets or information between separate blockchain networks, typically by locking an asset on one chain and minting a representative version on another. Full guide →
Crypto Risk Management: The set of practices — position sizing, stop-losses, diversification, custody choices — used to limit losses from crypto's volatility, leverage, and platform risk. Full guide →
Crypto Tax Recordkeeping: Tracking cost basis, disposals, and income events — trades, swaps, staking, airdrops — across wallets and exchanges well enough to file an accurate tax return. Full guide →
Cryptocurrency: A digitally represented asset whose ownership or transfer is recorded through cryptographic protocols on a blockchain or similar distributed ledger. Full guide →
Custody (Crypto): Who or what actually controls the private keys to a crypto asset — the owner (self-custody) or a third party such as an exchange or custodian (custodial).

D

DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization): An organization whose rules and, in some cases, treasury are governed largely through code and token-holder voting rather than a traditional corporate management structure.
Day Trading: A strategy of opening and closing positions within the same trading day, avoiding overnight exposure to price gaps.
Decentralized Exchange (DEX): A blockchain-based trading protocol that lets users swap assets through smart contracts while retaining control of their own wallet and keys. Full guide →
DeFi (Decentralized Finance): A broad category of blockchain applications — lending, trading, and asset management — that aim to provide financial functions through smart contracts instead of traditional intermediaries.
DeFi Yield: Returns earned by lending, supplying liquidity, or staking crypto assets in decentralized-finance protocols, generally paid from interest, trading fees, or token incentives. Full guide →
Derivative: A financial contract, such as an option or futures contract, whose value is derived from the price of an underlying asset rather than the asset itself.
Disposition Effect: The tendency to sell winning positions too early to lock in a gain while holding losing positions too long hoping to avoid realizing a loss. Full guide →
Dividend: A cash or stock payment a company distributes to shareholders, typically out of earnings.
Dividend Yield: A stock's annual dividend payment expressed as a percentage of its current share price.
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA): Investing a fixed amount at regular intervals regardless of price, which averages the purchase price over time instead of trying to time a single entry. Full guide →
Drawdown: The decline in a portfolio or asset's value from a prior peak to a subsequent low, expressed as a percentage, used to measure the depth of a losing stretch. Full guide →

E

Earnings Call and Guidance: A conference call, typically held quarterly, where company management discusses financial results and often provides guidance — its own forward-looking estimate for future revenue or earnings.
Emissions (Crypto): New tokens distributed by a protocol over time — through mining rewards, staking rewards, or incentive programs — that add to circulating and total supply. Full guide →
EPS (Earnings Per Share): A company's net income divided by its shares outstanding, showing profit on a per-share basis; it can be reported on a basic or diluted share count. Full guide →
ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund): A fund that holds a basket of assets and trades on an exchange like a stock, typically tracking an index, sector, or strategy.
Exchange and Custody Risk (Crypto): The risk that a crypto exchange, lender, or other custodian fails, freezes withdrawals, mismanages funds, or is compromised, exposing depositors to loss regardless of the asset's own market performance. Full guide →
Extended Hours Trading: Trading conducted outside a stock exchange's regular session — before the open (premarket) or after the close (after-hours) — usually with thinner liquidity.

F

Fibonacci Retracement: A technical analysis tool that marks horizontal levels, based on ratios from the Fibonacci sequence, at which a price pullback within a trend might find support or resistance.
Float: The number of a company's shares actually available for public trading, excluding closely held or restricted shares. Full guide →
Float Rotation: A measure of how many times a stock's tradable float has changed hands during a session, used to gauge how extreme a volume surge really is. Full guide →
FOMO (Fear of Missing Out): The anxiety of missing a profitable move, which can push traders to chase a price that has already run up, typically entering with a worse reward-to-risk profile than an earlier entry would have offered. Full guide →
Free Cash Flow: Cash generated by a company's operations after subtracting capital expenditures, representing cash actually available for debt repayment, dividends, buybacks, or reinvestment. Full guide →
Front-Running: Trading ahead of a known pending order — a client order, or in crypto, a pending public transaction — to profit from the price impact that order is expected to cause.
FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt): A term for negative information, rumors, or sentiment — sometimes accurate and sometimes deliberately spread — that pressures a market or asset's price lower.
Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV): A token's current price multiplied by its total or maximum defined supply, estimating valuation if every eventual token were priced at today's rate. Full guide →
Fundamental Analysis: Evaluating a security's value using financial statements, business quality, and economic factors rather than price and volume patterns.
Fundamental Stock Screen: A stock screen built from financial-statement metrics like revenue growth, earnings, margins, and valuation ratios rather than price and volume patterns. Full guide →
Funding Rate: A periodic payment exchanged between long and short holders of a perpetual futures contract to keep its price anchored to the underlying spot price. Full guide →

G

Gap (Earnings Gap, Gap Up, Gap Down): A difference between one period's closing price and the next period's opening price with no trading in between — a gap up opens higher, a gap down opens lower. Earnings announcements are a common cause.
Gas Fee: The fee paid to have a blockchain network process and include a transaction, which rises during network congestion or for more computationally intensive smart-contract interactions. Full guide →
Grid Trading: A strategy that places a ladder of buy and sell orders at set price intervals to profit from price oscillation inside a range. Full guide →

H

Hard Fork: A blockchain protocol change that is not backward-compatible, requiring all participants to upgrade or the network to split into two separate chains.
Herd Behavior: The tendency to follow what other traders are doing rather than independent analysis, which can amplify moves in both directions. Full guide →
Hindsight Bias: The tendency, after an outcome is known, to believe it was predictable all along, which can produce false confidence in future forecasts. Full guide →
HODL: Crypto slang for holding an asset through volatility rather than trading it, originally derived from a misspelling of "hold."
Holding Period: The intended length of time a position is meant to be held, which should shape which screening filters and data are relevant. Full guide →
Hot Wallet: A crypto wallet connected to the internet, offering convenience for frequent transactions at the cost of greater exposure to remote hacking than offline storage. Full guide →

I

Iceberg Order: A large order split so that only a small visible portion shows on the order book at a time, with the remainder revealed in increments as each visible slice fills.
Impermanent Loss: The temporary difference between holding assets in a liquidity pool versus holding them outright, caused by the pool automatically rebalancing as prices move; it becomes permanent only if liquidity is withdrawn while the divergence exists.
Index Fund: A fund designed to track the performance of a specified market index rather than trying to beat it through active stock selection.
Insider Trading: Buying or selling a security based on material, nonpublic information, which is illegal when done in breach of a duty of trust or confidence.
IPO (Initial Public Offering): The first sale of a private company's shares to the public, after which the stock begins trading on an exchange.

L

Layer 1: A base blockchain, like Bitcoin or Ethereum, that maintains its own transaction ordering, consensus, and settlement rules. Full guide →
Layer 2: A network built on top of a Layer 1 blockchain that processes transactions off the base layer for speed or cost, while relying on that base layer for some combination of data availability, dispute resolution, or final settlement. Full guide →
Leverage: Using borrowed capital to increase position size beyond what account equity alone would allow, which magnifies both gains and losses and can trigger liquidation if losses erode the required margin. Full guide →
Limit Order: An order to buy or sell at a specified price or better, which trades price certainty for the possibility of not being filled at all. Full guide →
Liquidation: The forced closing of a leveraged position by an exchange or broker when losses reduce account equity below the required maintenance margin. Full guide →
Liquidity: How easily an asset can be bought or sold without materially moving its price; a liquid market has tight spreads and sufficient depth, while a thin market can produce significant slippage. Full guide →
Liquidity Pool: A pool of two or more crypto assets locked in a smart contract that traders swap against, with liquidity providers earning a share of trading fees in return for supplying assets.
Loss Aversion: The tendency to feel the pain of a loss more strongly than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, which can lead to holding losers too long or cutting winners too early. Full guide →

M

MACD: A trend and momentum indicator built from the difference between two exponential moving averages, plotted alongside a signal line, with crossovers and divergence used to gauge shifting momentum. Full guide →
Margin: Borrowed funds from a broker used to increase buying power beyond an account's cash balance, which magnifies both gains and losses.
Margin Call: A broker's demand for additional funds or securities when an account's equity falls below the required maintenance level, which can force the account to sell positions if unmet.
Margin Requirement (Short Selling): The minimum equity a brokerage requires an account to maintain to support a short position, reflecting the potentially unlimited loss risk of a short sale. Full guide →
Market Capitalization: A token's or company's current price multiplied by its circulating supply or shares outstanding, used to compare the market value currently assigned to it. Full guide →
Market Order: An order to buy or sell immediately at the best currently available price, prioritizing speed of execution over price control. Full guide →
Max Supply: The maximum number of units a token's protocol is designed to ever create, if a hard cap is defined; not every token has one. Full guide →
Mining: The proof-of-work process of using computational power to validate transactions and add new blocks to a blockchain, in exchange for a block reward, transaction fees, or both.
Moving Average (SMA vs. EMA): A line that smooths price data over a set number of periods to show trend direction; a simple moving average (SMA) weights all periods equally, while an exponential moving average (EMA) weights recent periods more heavily and reacts faster to new price changes. Full guide →
Multisignature Wallet: A wallet that requires signatures from more than one private key to authorize a transaction, reducing the risk of a single compromised or lost key.

N

NFT (Non-Fungible Token): A blockchain-recorded token designed to represent a unique or distinguishable item or right, as opposed to interchangeable tokens like most cryptocurrencies.

O

OCO Order (One-Cancels-Other): A pair of linked orders — typically a limit order and a stop order — where the execution of either one automatically cancels the other. Full guide →
Off-Chain: Data or activity that occurs outside a blockchain's own recorded ledger, such as an order book matched by a company's servers before settlement is recorded on-chain.
On-Chain: Data or activity that is recorded directly on a blockchain and can be independently verified there.
Opening Auction: A batch auction that determines a stock's official opening price by matching accumulated buy and sell orders at a single point at the start of the trading session.
Oracle (Blockchain): A service that supplies external data — such as asset prices — to a smart contract, which otherwise cannot access information outside its own blockchain.
Order Book: A real-time list of outstanding buy and sell orders for an asset at different price levels, showing depth and the current best bid and ask.
Outcome Bias: Judging the quality of a trading decision by whether it happened to make money rather than by whether the decision was sound given the information available at the time. Full guide →
Overconfidence Bias: An inflated sense of one's own forecasting skill or edge, often following a winning streak, that leads to oversized positions or reduced risk controls. Full guide →
Overfitting: Tuning a strategy or screen so closely to historical data that it captures noise instead of a real, repeatable edge, and performs poorly going forward. Full guide →
Overtrading: Placing more trades, or larger positions, than a strategy or risk plan justifies, which increases transaction costs and correlated exposure without necessarily improving results. Full guide →

P

P/E Ratio: A stock's price divided by its earnings per share, used to gauge how much investors are paying for each dollar of a company's earnings. Full guide →
Pattern Day Trader (PDT) Rule: A FINRA rule that requires a margin account executing four or more day trades within five business days, where those trades exceed 6% of account activity, to maintain at least $25,000 in equity.
PEG Ratio: The P/E ratio divided by a company's expected earnings growth rate, intended to adjust valuation for how fast a company is growing. Full guide →
Portfolio Diversification: Spreading capital across assets that do not move in lockstep, so a loss in one is not fully mirrored across the whole portfolio; genuine diversification depends on real differences in risk drivers, not just holding more assets. Full guide →
Position Sizing: Determining how large a trade should be, typically based on account size, the distance to a stop-loss, and the percentage of capital the trader is willing to risk on that trade. Full guide →
Position Trading: A longer-horizon strategy that holds positions for weeks to months, or longer, to capture a sustained trend, tolerating short-term volatility along the way.
Premarket Trading: Trading that takes place before a stock exchange's regular session opens, typically with lower volume and wider spreads than the regular session.
Private Key: Secret cryptographic information used to produce the digital signatures required to authorize transactions from a blockchain address; anyone who obtains it can typically move the associated funds. Full guide →
Proof of Stake: A consensus mechanism in which validators lock up (stake) network assets and are rewarded or penalized based on their participation, replacing computational mining with capital at risk. Full guide →
Proof of Work: A consensus mechanism in which participants (miners) compete using computational power to add new blocks, making it economically expensive to rewrite transaction history. Full guide →
Prospectus: A formal disclosure document filed with the SEC that describes a securities offering, including the issuer's business, financials, and risk factors.
Pump and Dump: A scheme in which promoters hype an asset to drive its price up, then sell their own holdings into the buying they created, leaving later buyers holding the loss.
Put Option: A contract giving the holder the right, but not the obligation, to sell an underlying asset at a set price before expiration, often used as a bearish or hedging alternative to shorting. Full guide →

R

Recency Bias: The tendency to overweight recent price action or news when forming expectations, at the expense of longer-term context. Full guide →
Relative Volume (RVOL): A stock's current trading volume compared with its typical volume for the same period, used to flag unusual participation. Full guide →
Revenge Trading: Re-entering the market impulsively after a loss in an attempt to immediately win it back, typically with larger size or less discipline than the trader's normal process. Full guide →
Revenue Growth: The percentage increase in a company's sales over a prior period, used to gauge business momentum independent of profitability. Full guide →
Risk-Reward Ratio: The ratio between a trade's potential loss (distance to the stop) and its potential gain (distance to the target), used alongside win rate to judge whether a strategy has positive expectancy. Full guide →
Rollup: A Layer 2 scaling method that batches many transactions together off the base blockchain and submits the compressed results, along with proofs or fraud-challenge periods, back to the base layer for security.
RSI (Relative Strength Index): A momentum oscillator, typically scaled 0-100, that measures the speed and size of recent price changes to identify potentially overbought or oversold conditions. Full guide →
Rug Pull: A scam in which a project's creators abruptly withdraw liquidity, abandon development, or otherwise disappear with investor funds after building up hype or trust.
RVOL False Positive: An elevated relative-volume reading caused by a distortion — a split, halt, block trade, or thin baseline — rather than genuine new interest in the stock. Full guide →
RVOL Scanner: A screening tool that filters and ranks stocks in real time by relative volume alongside other criteria like price, float, and catalyst. Full guide →

S

Scalping: A very short-term trading style that targets small, frequent price moves, closing positions within seconds to minutes. Full guide →
Seed Phrase: A sequence of words used to restore access to a compatible crypto wallet, from which many private keys can typically be derived. Full guide →
Sharpe Ratio: A measure of risk-adjusted return that divides a portfolio's excess return over a risk-free rate by its volatility; a higher ratio indicates more return per unit of risk taken.
Shares Outstanding: The total number of a company's shares currently held by all shareholders, including restricted shares, used to calculate market capitalization and per-share metrics.
Short Interest: The total number of a stock's shares currently sold short and not yet covered, often expressed as a percentage of float or in days-to-cover. Full guide →
Short Selling: Selling borrowed shares with the intent to buy them back later at a lower price, profiting from the decline if the stock falls, and facing potentially unlimited loss if it rises. Full guide →
Short Squeeze: A rapid price increase in a heavily shorted stock that forces short sellers to buy shares to cover their positions, which pushes the price up further and can accelerate the squeeze. Full guide →
Short-Sale Restriction Rule: An SEC rule (Rule 201) that restricts new short sales at or below the best bid once a stock falls 10% or more intraday, remaining in effect for the rest of that day and the next. Full guide →
Sidechain: A separate blockchain that runs alongside a main chain and connects to it through a bridge, with its own consensus rules and validators.
Slippage: The difference between a trade's expected execution price and the price it actually fills at, typically caused by thin liquidity, fast-moving prices, or order size relative to available depth. Full guide →
Smart Contract: Self-executing code deployed to a blockchain that runs automatically according to its programmed logic and the transactions it receives.
Smart Contract Risk: The risk that a bug, exploit, or unreviewed admin privilege in a smart contract's code leads to loss of deposited funds, independent of whether the underlying idea or market thesis was sound. Full guide →
Soft Fork: A backward-compatible blockchain protocol upgrade that tightens the existing rules, so upgraded and non-upgraded nodes can still agree on the same chain.
Spoofing: Placing orders with no intent to execute them, in order to create a false impression of buying or selling interest and influence other traders, then canceling before execution; illegal in regulated markets.
Stablecoin: A crypto asset designed to maintain a stable value relative to a reference asset, most commonly the U.S. dollar, through reserves, collateral, or algorithmic mechanisms. Full guide →
Stablecoin Depeg Risk: The risk that a stablecoin's market price or redemption value falls away from its intended peg, commonly $1, driven by reserve, collateral, liquidity, or confidence problems. Full guide →
Staking: Committing crypto assets to a proof-of-stake network, directly or through a service, to help validate transactions, in exchange for rewards, while typically accepting lockup or penalty conditions.
Staking Rewards: Returns paid to participants who lock up (stake) a proof-of-stake token to help secure the network, funded by token emissions, transaction fees, or both. Full guide →
Stock Locate: A broker's confirmation that shares are available to borrow before a short sale is placed, required under Regulation SHO. Full guide →
Stock Screen: A set of criteria applied to a universe of stocks to narrow it down to a shorter list matching a trading strategy. Full guide →
Stock Screener: A tool that filters and ranks stocks by technical, fundamental, or volume-based criteria to help build a stock screen. Full guide →
Stock Split (Forward/Reverse): A forward split increases a company's share count while proportionally lowering the price per share; a reverse split reduces share count and proportionally raises the price per share. Neither changes the company's total value.
Stop Order: An order that becomes a market order once a security trades at or through a specified stop price, commonly used to limit losses or protect gains. Full guide →
Stop-Limit Order: An order that becomes a limit order, rather than a market order, once a specified stop price is reached, adding price protection at the cost of a chance the order never fills. Full guide →
Stop-Loss: A predetermined order or exit point that closes a losing position once a security reaches a specified price, used to cap the loss on a trade. Full guide →
Sunk-Cost Thinking: Continuing to hold or add to a losing position because of the money or time already invested, rather than because current conditions justify it. Full guide →
Support and Resistance: Price levels where a security has historically tended to stop falling (support) or stop rising (resistance) as buying or selling pressure increases, often used to plan entries, exits, and stops. Full guide →
Swing Trading: A strategy that holds positions for several days to a few weeks to capture a broader price swing than day trading, without the multi-month horizon of position trading. Full guide →

T

Tax-Loss Harvesting: Selling a losing position to realize a capital loss that can offset capital gains, and within limits ordinary income, for tax purposes, sometimes followed by reinvesting in a similar but not substantially identical asset.
Technical Analysis: Evaluating a security using price and volume charts and indicators, on the premise that historical price behavior can inform future price behavior, as opposed to analyzing the underlying business.
Technical Stock Screening: Filtering stocks using price and volume-based criteria — trend, moving averages, momentum, volatility — rather than financial statements. Full guide →
Time-Adjusted RVOL: A relative-volume calculation that compares volume-so-far against the average volume typically seen by the same time of day, correcting for volume's natural front- and back-loading. Full guide →
Token: A crypto asset created through a smart contract or protocol running on an existing blockchain, rather than on its own native chain.
Token Distribution and Concentration: How a token's supply is allocated among team, investors, treasury, and public holders, and how concentrated ownership is among the largest wallets — both relevant to insider-selling and governance risk. Full guide →
Token Inflation: The rate at which a protocol issues new units of its token over time, which can dilute existing holders unless offset by burns or rising demand. Full guide →
Token Utility: The actual functions a token performs within its ecosystem — such as paying fees, accessing features, or serving as collateral — as distinct from purely speculative demand. Full guide →
Token Vesting: A restriction that delays or gradually releases a token allocation to a recipient, such as a team or early investor, over a defined schedule rather than granting full access immediately. Full guide →
Tokenomics: The design of a token's supply, distribution, issuance, incentives, and value-capture mechanisms — in short, its economic structure. Full guide →
Total Supply: The number of a token's units that currently exist, including any that are locked, reserved, or not yet in circulation, but excluding any that have been permanently burned. Full guide →
Trading Discipline: The consistent, rule-based execution of a trading plan — position sizing, entries, exits, and risk limits — independent of emotion or short-term outcomes. Full guide →
Trading Halt: A temporary suspension of trading in a specific security, often triggered by pending news, extreme volatility, or a regulatory or exchange halt mechanism.
Trading Journal: A record kept of each trade's setup, reasoning, size, and outcome, used to review decision quality and identify recurring mistakes over time. Full guide →
Trading Performance Metrics: Measures of trading quality beyond raw profit and loss, such as rule-adherence rate, average risk taken versus planned, and R-multiples, intended to separate good process from lucky outcomes. Full guide →
Trading Psychology: The study of how emotions, biases, and discipline shape trading decisions, and the systems traders use to keep decisions consistent under stress. Full guide →
Trading Strategy: A defined, repeatable set of rules for entering, sizing, and exiting trades, matched to a trader's time horizon, risk tolerance, and market. Full guide →
Trailing Stop: A stop order whose trigger price automatically adjusts as the market price moves favorably, locking in more profit while still allowing an exit if the price reverses by a set amount.
Transaction Finality: The point at which a blockchain transaction is considered settled and effectively irreversible, with the specific threshold varying by network, consensus mechanism, and the service relying on it. Full guide →
Trend Following: A strategy that enters in the direction of an established price trend and stays in the trade until the trend shows signs of reversing. Full guide →
Trendline: A line drawn across a series of price highs or lows on a chart to visualize the direction and steepness of a trend, and to identify potential support or resistance.

U

Unlock Schedule: The calendar on which previously vested or restricted tokens become transferable, which can materially increase circulating supply on specific dates. Full guide →

V

Value Capture (Token): The mechanisms by which a token's price is meant to benefit from the growth of its underlying protocol, such as fee burns, buybacks, or revenue sharing, as opposed to relying purely on speculative demand. Full guide →
Volatility: The degree and speed of price fluctuation in a security or market; higher volatility means larger and/or more frequent price swings in either direction.
Volume: The number of shares, contracts, or units of an asset traded during a given period, used as a gauge of participation and conviction behind a price move.
VWAP (Volume-Weighted Average Price): The average price of a security over a period, weighted by the volume traded at each price, commonly used as an intraday benchmark for execution quality.

W

Wallet: Software or hardware that manages the cryptographic keys needed to view balances and authorize transactions for a blockchain account; it manages access rather than physically holding the assets.
Wallet Security Score: A checklist-based score evaluating how well a user's crypto wallet setup protects against common failure modes — custody model, backups, authentication, device security, and recovery planning. Full guide →
Wash Sale Rule: A U.S. tax rule that disallows claiming a loss on a security sold at a loss if a substantially identical security is purchased within 30 days before or after the sale; the disallowed loss is added to the new position's cost basis instead.
Wash Trading: Simultaneously or near-simultaneously buying and selling the same asset to create misleading trading volume without a genuine change in economic position; illegal in regulated markets and a known issue on some crypto venues.
Whale (Crypto): An informal term for a wallet or entity holding a large enough position in an asset that its trades can noticeably move the market.
Whitepaper: A document published by a crypto project describing its technology, token design, and intended use, roughly analogous to a business plan; quality and accuracy vary widely.

Y

Yield Farming: Moving crypto assets between DeFi protocols or pools to chase the highest available yield, typically combining lending, liquidity provision, and token incentive rewards.

Interactive Crypto Glossary — a smaller, crypto-only glossary with category filtering.
Crypto Fundamentals: Wallets, Blockchains, Tokens & Risk
How Short Selling Works
How to Backtest a Stock Trading Strategy
Trading Strategy Comparison Center

Reviewed by the Swoopr Markets Education Team, July 2026. This content is educational and informational only and is not personalized investment, legal, accounting, tax, or cybersecurity advice. Definitions are simplified for general understanding; consult the linked full guides and primary sources for details before making a trading decision.

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