Key terms used in cryptocurrency, forex, metals, and commodity markets.
All-Time High
The highest price an asset has ever traded at, abbreviated ATH. Distance below the ATH is commonly quoted as a measure of drawdown.
Automated Market Maker
A decentralised exchange design that prices trades from a mathematical formula over pooled reserves rather than by matching individual buy and sell orders.
Average Directional Index
An indicator, abbreviated ADX, that measures trend strength on a 0–100 scale without indicating direction. Readings below 20 suggest no trend; above 25 suggest a trend is present.
Baseline Rate
The rate at which price moved a given way over a given period without any signal present. It is the comparison a signal's success rate has to beat to mean anything.
Bid-Ask Spread
The gap between the highest price a buyer will pay and the lowest a seller will accept. It is the immediate cost of entering and exiting a position.
Bollinger Bands
A moving average plotted with bands set a number of standard deviations above and below it, so the bands widen when volatility rises and contract when it falls.
Bridge
A protocol that moves value between blockchains, typically by locking an asset on one chain and issuing a representation of it on another.
Candlestick Chart
A price chart where each period is drawn as a body spanning the open and close, with wicks extending to the high and low. The body is coloured by whether the close was above or below the open.
Canonical URL
The address declared as the authoritative version of a page when the same content is reachable through several URLs, so that search engines consolidate signals on one.
Centralised Exchange
A company-operated trading platform that holds customer funds and matches orders on its own internal ledger. Abbreviated CEX.
Chart Pattern
A recognisable shape in price action — such as a head and shoulders, triangle, or channel — traditionally read as indicating a likely continuation or reversal.
Circulating Supply
The number of coins publicly available and tradeable right now, excluding tokens that are locked, reserved, staked under a lock-up, or provably burned.
Commodity
A basic physical good traded in standardised units, such as crude oil, natural gas, or agricultural products, where one unit is interchangeable with another.
Confluence
The coincidence of several independent signals pointing the same way at the same time, on the theory that agreement between methods is more reliable than any one of them.
Contract Address
Death Cross
The crossing of a shorter moving average below a longer one, usually the 50-day below the 200-day, traditionally read as a bearish signal.
Decentralised Exchange
An exchange where trades settle directly between wallets through smart contracts, with no operator taking custody of funds. Abbreviated DEX.
Decentralised Finance
Financial services — lending, trading, derivatives — built as smart contracts on public blockchains rather than operated by an institution. Abbreviated DeFi.
Drawdown
The decline from a peak to a subsequent low, expressed as a percentage. Maximum drawdown is the largest such decline over a period.
Edge Score
Our own per-asset reading, built by weighting each recent indicator signal by the historical edge we have measured for it. Signals with no proven edge contribute nothing.
Exponential Moving Average
A moving average that weights recent prices more heavily than older ones, so it responds faster to a change in direction than a simple average of the same length.
Foreign Exchange
The market in which currencies are traded against one another, quoted as pairs such as EUR/USD. Abbreviated forex or FX.
Freezable Token
A token whose issuer can prevent specific accounts from transferring their balance.
Fully Diluted Valuation
What a project's market capitalisation would be if every token that will ever exist were in circulation today, at today's price. Abbreviated FDV.
Gas Fee
The payment made to a blockchain's validators for the computation and storage a transaction consumes, priced in the network's native token.
Golden Cross
The crossing of a shorter moving average above a longer one, most commonly the 50-day above the 200-day, traditionally read as a bullish signal.
Governance Token
A token that confers voting rights over a protocol's parameters, treasury, or upgrades, in proportion to the amount held.
Impermanent Loss
The shortfall a liquidity provider experiences relative to simply holding the two assets, arising when their relative price changes after the deposit.
Indexable Page
A page eligible to appear in search results, as opposed to one served with a noindex directive that keeps it out while remaining readable and crawlable.
Ingestion Worker
A background process that fetches data from external providers on a schedule and writes it to our own storage, so that user traffic never triggers an outside API call.
Integrity Check
An automated comparison of each asset's current price against the most recent candle in its own stored history, run periodically to surface unit and mapping errors.
Layer 1
A base blockchain that settles its own transactions and provides its own security, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Solana.
Layer 2
A network that processes transactions off a base chain while inheriting its security by settling proofs or data back to it, reducing cost and congestion.
Liquidity
How readily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price. Deep liquidity means large orders fill near the quoted price; thin liquidity means they do not.
Liquidity Pool
A smart contract holding reserves of two or more tokens, against which an automated market maker executes trades. Depositors earn a share of trading fees.
Look-Ahead Bias
A flaw in backtesting where a calculation uses information that was not yet available at the moment it claims to act, producing results that could never have been achieved live.
MACD
Moving Average Convergence Divergence: the difference between two exponential moving averages, plotted with a signal line. Crossings of the two lines are read as momentum shifts.
Market Capitalisation
The total value of a cryptocurrency's circulating supply, calculated as the current price multiplied by the number of coins in circulation. It is the standard measure of a project's relative size.
Meme Coin
A token whose value rests on community attention and cultural momentum rather than on a product, cash flow, or technical claim.
Mintable Supply
A token contract that retains the ability to create new tokens after launch, diluting existing holders whenever it is used.
Moving Average
The average price over a fixed number of recent periods, redrawn each period. It smooths short-term noise to make the underlying direction easier to read.
Proof of Reserves
A cryptographic attestation by an exchange demonstrating that it holds assets matching customer balances at a point in time.
Proxy Contract
A contract that forwards calls to a separate implementation contract, so that the logic can be replaced later without changing the address holders interact with.
Real World Assets
Tokens representing claims on off-chain assets such as treasury bills, real estate, private credit, or commodities. Abbreviated RWA.
Relative Strength Index
A momentum oscillator, abbreviated RSI, that compares the size of recent gains to recent losses on a 0–100 scale. Readings above 70 are conventionally called overbought and below 30 oversold.
Renounced Ownership
The state where a token contract's owner address has been set to the zero address, permanently removing the ability to call owner-restricted functions such as minting, pausing, or blacklisting.
Rug Pull
An exit scam in which a project's team removes the liquidity backing a token or dumps a large reserved allocation, collapsing the price and leaving holders unable to sell.
Safe Haven Asset
An asset expected to retain or gain value during market stress, traditionally gold, the US dollar, and government bonds of stable issuers.
Sample Size
The number of observations a statistic rests on. Small samples produce figures that look precise and are not.
Slippage
The difference between the price expected when an order is placed and the price at which it actually fills, caused by the order consuming more than one level of the order book.
Smart Contract
Program code deployed to a blockchain that executes automatically when its conditions are met, without an intermediary holding or releasing funds.
Spot Price
The price for immediate delivery of an asset, as distinct from a futures price for delivery at a later date.
Stablecoin
A token designed to hold a constant value against a reference asset, usually the US dollar, backed either by reserves held off-chain or by on-chain collateral and algorithmic mechanisms.
Staking
Locking tokens to help secure a proof-of-stake network or to earn protocol rewards, usually with a delay or penalty attached to withdrawal.
Stochastic Oscillator
A momentum indicator that locates the closing price within its recent high-low range on a 0–100 scale, on the reasoning that closes cluster near the highs in an uptrend.
Token Burn
The permanent removal of tokens from circulation by sending them to an address from which they cannot be retrieved, reducing total supply.
Tokenomics
The economic design of a token: how many exist, how they are distributed, how new ones are created or destroyed, and what holding one entitles the holder to.
Total Value Locked
The aggregate value of assets deposited in a protocol's contracts, abbreviated TVL, used as a rough measure of adoption.
Trading Pair
Two assets quoted against each other on an exchange, such as BTC/USDT. The first is the base asset being priced; the second is the quote asset it is priced in.
Trading Volume
The total value of an asset traded over a given period, usually 24 hours. It measures activity and, indirectly, how easily a position can be entered or exited.
Trust Score
A composite rating assigned to an exchange based on reported liquidity, order book depth, trading volume plausibility, and operational transparency.
Vesting
A schedule under which allocated tokens are released to a team or investors over time rather than at launch, intended to align them with the project's longer-term outcome.
Volatility
The degree to which an asset's price moves over time, usually measured as the standard deviation of its returns. High volatility means large moves in both directions.
The unique on-chain address where a token's smart contract is deployed. It is the only unambiguous identifier for a token, since names and ticker symbols can be duplicated freely.