Community › Glossary
Price & Session
What the numbers on a quote actually mean, and how the trading day is structured.
Last PriceThe price of the most recent trade — the number everyone means by "the price".›Day Change %How far the price has moved from the previous session's close, in percent.›Gap / Gap-UpWhen a stock opens meaningfully above or below the previous close, leaving a price "gap" on the chart.›Premarket SessionUS equity trading before the 09:30 ET open — thin, volatile, and where gappers first show themselves.›Regular Trading Hours (RTH)The official US equity session: 09:30–16:00 ET, where most volume and most reliable data live.›Opening RangeThe high–low range of the first minutes after the open — a reference frame for the whole day.›Day High / Day LowThe highest and lowest trade prices of the current session — the day's battle lines.›High-Low Midpoint %Where the price sits relative to the middle of the day's range — above or below the session's center of gravity.›Trading HaltAn exchange pause in trading — usually volatility circuit breakers (LULD) or pending news.›
Volume & Tape
Reading executed trades — who is buying, who is selling, and how hard.
VolumeHow many shares (or coins) changed hands — the fuel gauge behind every price move.›Turnover (Dollar Volume)Volume × price — how much money traded, the honest measure of liquidity.›Buyer vs Seller VolumeSplitting executed volume by which side initiated the trade — aggression, not just activity.›Trade StrengthThe ratio of buyer-initiated to seller-initiated volume, ×100 — above 100, buyers are paying up.›Buy/Sell Amount ImbalanceComparing the dollars spent lifting the offer vs hitting the bid — the money-weighted version of the tape.›Price-by-Volume LevelsWhich price levels accumulated the most traded money today — the session's gravity wells.›Relative Volume (RVOL)Today's activity compared to what is normal for this stock — the "is something happening?" detector.›Time & Sales (The Tape)The raw feed of executed trades — price, size, time, one line per trade.›
Order Book
The queue of resting orders around the price, and what its shape tells you.
Order BookThe live queue of resting buy and sell orders at each price — the market's visible supply and demand.›Best Bid & Ask (Level 1)The highest price a buyer will pay and the lowest a seller will take — the only two truly tradable prices.›Bid-Ask SpreadThe gap between best bid and best ask — the toll you pay to trade immediately.›Market Depth (Level 2)The order book beyond the top — up to ten price levels per side, with size at each.›Depth ImbalanceTotal resting bid size vs total ask size — which side of the book is heavier.›Book Levels (Data Grade)How many depth levels your feed actually carries — a data-quality fact your strategy should check.›
Bars & Indicators
Aggregating ticks into bars, and the calculations traders run on them.
Candlestick (OHLC)One bar summarizing a time slice: where price opened, the extremes it reached, and where it closed.›1-Minute Bars (Timeframe Mixing)Running second-level triggers against minute-level context in the same strategy.›Simple Moving Average (SMA)The average price over the last N periods — the baseline trend line of technical analysis.›VWAPThe volume-weighted average price of the session — the institutional benchmark price.›VolatilityHow much price moves per unit of time — the size of the waves, independent of their direction.›Rising / Falling StreaksWhether price has moved one way without a single counter-tick over a window — momentum as stubbornness.›Change AngleThe slope of the day-change line over a window — how steeply the move is climbing, in one number.›Amount AngleThe slope of cumulative turnover — is money arriving faster or slower than a moment ago?›Lookback (N Periods Ago)Reading any factor's value as of N seconds or bars ago — the building block of hand-rolled indicators.›
Strategy Engine
The building blocks of an automated strategy in TraderWe's DSL.
Strategy DSLThe small Python-style language TraderWe strategies are written in — rules, not code plumbing.›Entry SignalThe condition that opens a position — the moment a strategy commits money to an opinion.›Exit SignalThe condition that closes a position — where the profit distribution of a system is actually decided.›Holding ContextWhat the engine knows about your open position — entry price, profit, hold time — injected into the strategy.›Split Entries & ExitsScaling into or out of a position in pieces instead of all at once.›Long & ShortProfiting from rises (long) or falls (short) — and markets where each is possible.›Universe ScanningAutomatically selecting which symbols the strategy watches — the funnel before any rule runs.›
Backtesting
Proving a strategy on recorded data before risking money on it.
BacktestRunning a strategy against historical data to see how it would have traded — the experiment before the risk.›Market ReplayRe-playing recorded market data tick by tick — watching a past session unfold as if it were live.›1-Second DataMarket data aggregated to one row per second — fine enough for intraday truth, small enough to record everything.›SlippageThe difference between the price your model assumed and the price you actually got.›Fill (Execution)An order actually executing — partially or fully — and the price reality of it.›OverfittingTuning a strategy until it memorizes the past instead of learning something that repeats.›Out-of-Sample TestingValidating on data the strategy has never seen — the only test that resembles the future.›Paper TradingLive signals, real market data, simulated money — the dress rehearsal between backtest and real orders.›
Risk & Exits
Getting out — the rules and the numbers that decide whether a system survives.
Stop-LossA rule that closes a losing position at a predefined level — the price of staying in the game.›Take-Profit (Target)A rule that banks a winning position at a predefined gain — deciding in advance what "enough" means.›Trailing StopAn exit that follows the position's best profit and triggers on the give-back — letting winners run, but not round-trip.›DrawdownThe fall from an equity peak to the trough after it — the pain metric that decides whether you keep trading.›Win RateThe share of trades that closed profitable — meaningful only next to the size of wins versus losses.›Profit FactorGross profits divided by gross losses — how many dollars came in per dollar that went out.›Equity CurveAccount value plotted over time — the shape of a strategy's life, not just its endpoint.›
Educational content, not investment advice. Engine details describe how TraderWe computes each value; other platforms may define the same term differently.