Glossary

Every term the lessons use, in plain words.

Absorption: Aggressive orders meeting enough waiting limit orders on the other side that price barely moves. On a chart: CVD moving hard while price stays flat.
Aggressor: The taker in a trade: the buyer who accepted the ask, or the seller who accepted the bid. Order-flow tools count volume by the aggressor's side.
Anchored VWAP: A VWAP that starts at a candle the trader chooses — a top, a low, an event — and adds every candle since, instead of restarting each day.
Ask: An order to sell at a set price or higher, waiting in the order book. The lowest ask is the best price a buyer can get right now.
ATR (average true range): The average range of recent candles, counting gaps from the previous close: the terminal uses Wilder's 14-candle average.
Bid: An order to buy at a set price or lower, waiting in the order book. The highest bid is the best price a seller can get right now.
Break of structure (BOS): In Smart Money Concepts, a candle that closes through the last swing in the direction of the trend — above the last swing high in an uptrend, below the last swing low in a downtrend.
Buy-side and sell-side liquidity: In Smart Money Concepts, orders resting just beyond swing highs (buy-side: short stops and breakout buys) and swing lows (sell-side: long stops and breakdown sells).
Candle: One bar of a price chart for a fixed period: its open, high, low and close. Green when it closed above its open, red when it closed below.
Change of character (ChoCH): In Smart Money Concepts, the first candle that closes through the swing on the other side of the trend — below the last swing low in an uptrend, above the last swing high in a downtrend.
CVD (cumulative volume delta): A running total of volume delta from a chosen starting point. Rising CVD: takers bought more than they sold over that stretch; falling: they sold more.
Divergence: Price and an indicator disagreeing at swing points. With CVD: price makes a higher high on a lower CVD (bearish), or a lower low on a higher CVD (bullish).
Drawdown: The fall from a peak to a later low, in percent. Recovering a drawdown of x% takes a rise of 100 × x ÷ (100 − x) percent: 50% back needs 100%.
EMA (exponential moving average): An average of recent closes that gives the newest the most weight: EMA = close × k + previous EMA × (1 − k), with k = 2 ÷ (candles + 1).
Exhaustion: A move running out of aggressive traders: price still extends, but the market orders behind it shrink. Often seen as a divergence between price and CVD.
Expectancy: What one trade of a plan is worth on average: win rate × average win − loss rate × average loss, usually in R.
Fair value gap (FVG): Three candles where a fast middle candle leaves the first and third candles' wicks apart; the prices between them traded only during that one candle.
Fibonacci retracement: Levels drawn on one leg of price at 23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8% and 78.6% of it, measured back from its end, to mark how deep a pullback has gone.
Funding rate: A payment between longs and shorts of a perpetual, made at fixed times (every 8 hours on BTCUSDT at Binance). Positive: longs pay shorts; negative: shorts pay longs.
Iceberg order: A limit order that shows only part of its size in the book. When the visible part fills, the next part appears at the same price. Binance spot supports them.
Index price: An average of a coin's spot price on several exchanges. Futures prices, funding and the mark price are measured against it.
Leverage: Holding a position bigger than your margin: at 10×, $1,000 of margin holds a $10,000 position, and every 1% the price moves is 10% of your margin.
Limit order: An order to buy or sell at a set price or better. If it cannot be filled at once, it waits in the order book.
Liquidation: The exchange closing a leveraged position by force because its losses have eaten the margin down to the maintenance margin. The trader loses the margin.
Liquidity: How easily something can be bought or sold without moving its price much — in practice, how many orders wait near the price.
Long position: A position that gains when the price rises. On futures, opening a long means buying contracts; closing it means selling them.
Long/short ratio: A count of how many accounts — or how much of the top traders' position size — is net long versus net short. Not the amount of longs and shorts, which is always equal.
Maintenance margin: The smallest margin a position must keep. It is a small share of the position's value, set by the exchange, and larger for larger positions.
Maker: The side of a trade whose order was already waiting in the order book when the trade happened. A maker adds liquidity; a taker removes it.
Margin: The money set aside to hold a leveraged position. Losses come out of it; when what is left falls to the maintenance margin, the position is liquidated.
Mark price: The price an exchange uses for liquidations and unrealised profit and loss, built from the spot index and the futures price so that one odd trade cannot trigger liquidations.
Market depth: How much is waiting to be bought and sold at each price level near the current price. A deep book can absorb large orders.
Market order: An order to buy or sell at once at the best prices available in the order book. It never waits, so its final price is not known in advance.
Market structure: The sequence of swing highs and lows on a chart. Higher highs and higher lows make an uptrend; lower highs and lower lows a downtrend.
Open interest: The number of futures contracts open right now — every long matched by a short. It rises when new positions are opened and falls when positions are closed.
Order block: In Smart Money Concepts, the last candle of the opposite colour before an impulse that broke structure; its high–low range is treated as a zone.
Order book: The live list of orders waiting to be filled for one trading pair — bids to buy below the price, asks to sell above it.
Perpetual futures: A futures contract with no expiry date. You hold a bet on the price, long or short, as long as you like; a regular funding payment keeps its price close to the coin's.
Point of control (POC): In a volume profile, the price bin where the most volume traded during the chosen period.
Position size: How much of an asset a trade buys or sells. Sized from risk: position = account × risk per trade ÷ distance to the stop.
Premium index: How far a perpetual trades above or below its index price, measured by Binance at the prices a modest market order would get. It drives the funding rate.
R (R-multiple): A trade's result measured in units of the amount risked on it: a stopped-out trade is −1R, a win of three times the risk is +3R.
Short position: A position that gains when the price falls. On futures, opening a short means selling contracts you do not own; closing it means buying them back.
Slippage: The difference between the price you expected — usually the best price in the book — and the average price you actually got.
Spoofing: Placing orders you intend to cancel before they fill, to mislead others about supply or demand. Illegal in US futures markets under the Commodity Exchange Act.
Spot market: The market where an asset is bought and sold for immediate delivery: buying BTC on spot means owning BTC.
Spread: The gap between the best bid and the best ask. A tight spread means it is cheap to trade right now.
Stop order: An order that waits unseen until a trade prints at its trigger price, then sends a market order (or, as a stop-limit, a limit order). A stop-loss is a stop that closes a losing position.
Support and resistance: Price zones where falls (support) or rises (resistance) have stopped before, because buyers or sellers stepped in there.
Sweep (liquidity sweep): A candle that trades through a swing high or low but opens and closes back on the near side of it.
Swing point: A local high or low on a chart: a candle whose high is above (or whose low is below) those of the candles on both sides of it.
Taker: The side of a trade whose order executed at once against an order already waiting in the book — a market order, or a limit order priced to trade immediately.
Tape (time and sales): The list of trades as they happen: time, price, size and which side was the taker. The name comes from the old ticker tape.
Tick size: The smallest step a price can move on a given trading pair, set by the exchange — for BTC/USDT on Binance, one cent.
Timeframe: The period one candle covers: one minute, one hour, one day and so on. The same market can look very different on different timeframes.
Value area: In a volume profile, the band of prices around the point of control where about 70% of the period's volume traded.
Volume: The amount traded in a period — on a BTC/USDT chart, in BTC. Every trade has a buyer and a seller, so volume has no side.
Volume delta: Taker buy volume minus taker sell volume over a period, usually one candle. Positive: takers bought more than they sold; negative: they sold more.
VWAP (volume-weighted average price): The average price of a period with each price weighted by the volume traded at it: Σ(price × volume) ÷ Σ volume. On charts, usually restarted every day.
Wall: An unusually large limit order, or a cluster of them, at one price in the order book — far bigger than the levels around it and visible to everyone.
Whale: A trader or an order that is large compared with a market's usual size. The terminal marks a BTC trade as a whale at $25,000 or more and 20 times the recent average trade.