▲ Work in progress. This site is built and researched in the open: pages, numbers and findings may change or be wrong, and the record has gaps. Not advice. More

Glossary

The site's words in plain terms · 50 of them, in 6 groups

Markets The order book Futures traders Liquidations Numbers and the Lab Bots

Markets

Spot: Buying or selling the coin itself, paid for in full and handed over at once.
Perpetual future (perpetual, perp): A contract that follows a coin's price without ever expiring, traded with borrowed money. Funding keeps its price near the coin's. Most crypto trading is in these. Seen on: funding.
Long: A bet that the price will rise: bought now to sell higher.
Short: A bet that the price will fall: sold now to buy back lower.
Leverage: Trading with borrowed money. At 10×, $1,000 holds a $10,000 position: gains and losses are ten times larger, and a move of under 10% against it can wipe the $1,000 out.
Margin: The trader's own money behind a leveraged position. When losses use it up, the exchange liquidates.
Stablecoin (USDT, USDC): A token meant to stay worth one US dollar. Most perpetuals are priced and settled in one.
Exchange (venue): Where the trading happens. The site records futures on seven: Binance, Bybit, OKX, Gate, Bitget, MEXC and Hyperliquid; and order books from Coinbase (spot) and OKX.
Market cap: A coin's price × the coins in circulation, in US dollars: how big the coin is. From CoinGecko, every 6 hours. Gold, silver and oil perpetuals have none. Seen on: analysis · home.
Volume: The US dollars traded in a period, here 24 hours on Binance's and OKX's perpetuals: how busy a market is. Seen on: analysis · home.
Annualised: A rate turned into a yearly figure, so rates paid at different intervals can be compared: the rate × the times it is charged in a year. Seen on: funding.
Basis point (bp, bps): A hundredth of a percent: 0.01%. 100 bps is 1%; 10 bps on $10,000 is $10. Seen on: the Lab.

The order book

Order book: The orders waiting on an exchange: bids, to buy, below the price; asks, to sell, above it. Seen on: a coin page.
Bid / ask: A bid is an order waiting to buy at a price; an ask, to sell. The best bid and the best ask are the closest to the price.
Mid price: Halfway between the best bid and the best ask. The site's price is the average of the mid prices of the books it reads. Seen on: home.
Depth: The US dollars waiting in the order books near the price, bids and asks together, here within 1% (or 5%). More depth, a steadier price: it takes more money to move it. Seen on: analysis.
Imbalance: Bids against asks near the price: (bids − asks) ÷ (bids + asks). Positive: more money waiting to buy than to sell. Seen on: analysis · Lab study 1.
Wall: A price holding far more orders than those around it. The price may stall at a wall, bounce off it or break through; walls can be pulled in a second, so they are intent, not a promise. Seen on: a coin page.
Order book over time (heatmap): The book drawn every five minutes for a day, brighter where more money waits, with the price line through it. Seen on: a coin page.

Futures traders

Open interest (OI): The US dollars in open futures positions. Rising with the price: new money arriving; falling: positions being closed. Seen on: analysis · funding.
Funding: What one side of a perpetual pays the other, every few hours, to keep its price near the coin's. Positive: longs pay shorts, so more traders are long. Shown as a yearly rate. Seen on: funding.
Resting rate: The funding many exchanges charge when neither side is crowded: 0.01% every 8 hours, about +11% a year. Seen on: funding.
Funding gap: The highest funding less the lowest across the exchanges, in percentage points a year. Wide: traders on one exchange crowding a side the others do not. Seen on: funding.
Weighted funding: The exchanges' funding averaged, each weighted by its open interest. Seen on: funding.
Taker / maker: A taker trades at once against orders already waiting (a market order); a maker's order waits in the book for someone to take it.
Taker buys (buy share): Market buys as a share of all market orders. Above 50%: buyers were the more eager side. Seen on: analysis.
Long/short ratio: Of Binance's accounts, net long ÷ net short. "Top traders" are its biggest accounts; "all accounts", everyone. Above 1: more of them long. Seen on: a coin page.

Liquidations

Liquidation: A position closed by force by the exchange, because its losses used up the margin behind it. Seen on: liquidations.
Long liquidated / short liquidated: A long closed by force is a forced sell: the price fell. A short closed by force is a forced buy: the price rose. Seen on: liquidations.
Cascade: Liquidations setting off more: forced selling pushes the price down, which forces out the next longs, and so on (or the same upwards). Seen on: Lab study 7.
Whale: Here, a single liquidation of $100k or more. Seen on: home.
Liquidations ÷ depth: A day's liquidations as a share of the depth within 1%: high, forced orders were large for how thin the book was. Seen on: analysis.
Totals are a floor: Exchanges publish only some of their liquidations (Binance at most one a second for each coin), so the totals here are the least that happened, not all of it. Seen on: liquidations.

Numbers and the Lab

Volatility (vol): How much a price swings, as a yearly figure: 50% means moves of about half the price in a typical year. Seen on: analysis.
Correlation: How alike two series move: 1 in step, 0 unrelated, −1 opposite. Here, the coins' five-minute moves over a day. Seen on: analysis.
Rank correlation: Correlation of the order, not the size: sort the hours by the signal and by the move after; +1 means the order always matched. The Lab's main measure. Seen on: the Lab.
t: An effect over its uncertainty: how many times larger it is than chance alone would make it. The Lab asks for beyond ±3. Seen on: the Lab.
Fifths: The record split into five equal groups by the signal, low to high, to show the size of an effect in money. Seen on: the Lab.
Holds on new data: A study's settings were fixed on one date; the record from after it, unseen when they were chosen, is the real test. Seen on: the Lab.
The verdicts: Holds up: every test passed. Real, but small: every test passed but one: the effect is too small to pay for a trade's costs. Partly: more than chance, but some tests failed. A hint: t beyond ±2 but not ±3: perhaps something, perhaps luck. No sign: nothing the record can tell from chance. Too early: under 2 weeks of record. No reliable edge: a write-up's word: what looked good did not hold up against chance or on unseen data. No edge after fees: a write-up's word: there is something, but trading costs eat it. Not shown: a write-up's word: the record could not show that the idea helps. Passed, on a weak bar: a write-up's word: it cleared the bar set in advance, but the bar proved easy; the stricter reading, added after, is shown apart. No reliable gain: a write-up's word: the versions that looked better did not clear the bar set in advance: all three coins, at both a day and a week. Failed on fresh data: a write-up's word: a lead from one study, tested again on prices kept apart, did not hold. Not proven, a lead: a write-up's word: it failed the test set in advance, but pointed the same way throughout; worth a fresh test. Holds, with the coins paid for: a write-up's word: it held up through every test, but only as set out: the coins bought outright, nothing borrowed. Not confirmed; the lead holds: a write-up's word: on fresh data it fell just short of the bar set in advance, but still pointed the same way. Seen on: the Lab.

Bots

grid-gremlin application: The trading app behind the paper bots: a grid and buy-the-dips bot, its engine, panel and research, built from scratch. Its open-source edition, grid-gremlin CE, is free to run yourself. Seen on: its real panel · paper bots.
Paper trading: Trading with money that is not real: an exchange's demo or test account. Nothing on this site is real trading. Seen on: paper bots.
Demo / testnet: An exchange's practice accounts: real prices, play money. Seen on: paper bots.
Grid bot: Buys a little each time the price steps down and sells it again a step higher, across a range. Seen on: paper bots · the grid study.
Range and rungs: A grid's lowest and highest prices, and the price steps (rungs) between them. Seen on: the grid study.
Stop: An order that closes a position when the price passes a set level, to cap a loss. Seen on: the grid study.
DCA bot: Dollar-cost averaging: adds to a position as the price moves against it, then sells on a bounce. Seen on: paper bots.
Portfolio bot: A basket of positions held together and rebalanced. Seen on: paper bots.
Hedged: Holding both sides, for example the coin and a short on its perpetual, so the price matters less than the funding between them. Seen on: paper bots.
Round trip: A buy and its matching sell, both done. Seen on: paper bots.

Educational research from public market data; any trading discussed is paper, never real. Nothing here is advice. The full notice.