75 terms every new trader runs into, each answered in a few lines. 22 of them have a page of their own with worked examples from 12 months of Kraken prices for Bitcoin, Ethereum and six more coins (Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026).
Then practice them in Staxo, free on iPhone and Android with $500 in demo money. Also on Google Play.Also on the App Store.
Terms in purple have their own page. Jump to a topic: Orders and execution, Positions, leverage and P&L, Risk and market statistics, Charts and indicators, Strategies and trading styles, Coins and supply, Blockchain, wallets and exchanges, Market psychology and slang.
A market order buys or sells right away at the best price available at that moment. You choose the amount, not the price, so the fill can differ a little from the price on your screen, especially in a fast market or a thinly traded coin. It is the simplest order type.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, Bitcoin's price moved a median 3.06% between its daily high and low, Dogecoin's 4.68%: the spread of prices a market order could fill at on a typical day.
A limit order buys or sells only at a price you set or better. A buy limit sits below the current price and fills only if the market comes down to it, a sell limit sits above it. You control the price but not whether the order fills: if the market never gets there, nothing happens.
Example A buy limit 3% under the previous close would have filled on 68 of 365 days for Bitcoin and on 19 for TRON, from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 (Kraken daily lows).
A stop-loss is an order that sells a position automatically once the price falls to a level you chose in advance, to cap the loss on a trade. When it triggers it usually becomes a market order, so in a sharp drop the actual sale can fill below the stop price.
Example A stop 5% under the previous close would have been hit on 15 days for Bitcoin and 74 days for Cardano between Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026.
Read more: Stop-loss and take-profit orders
A take-profit is an order that closes a position automatically once the price reaches a target above your entry, or below it for a short. It locks in a gain without you watching the screen, but it also ends the trade even if the price would have kept going your way.
Read more: Stop-loss and take-profit orders
The order book is the live list of open buy orders (bids) and sell orders (asks) for a coin on an exchange, sorted by price. It shows how much is on offer at each price level, so traders read it to judge liquidity and to see where large orders are waiting.
Read more: Liquidity
The bid-ask spread is the gap between the highest price a buyer offers (the bid) and the lowest price a seller asks (the ask). It is a hidden cost: buy at the ask and sell straight away at the bid and you lose the spread. Busy markets have narrow spreads, quiet ones wide spreads.
Read more: Crypto trading fees explained
Slippage is the difference between the price you expected when you placed a trade and the price at which it actually filled. It happens when the price moves between your click and the fill, or when your order is bigger than what is on offer at the best price and eats into the order book.
Example On Kraken, Bitcoin traded a median $144 million a day from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 and Cardano $5.0 million: the thinner the market, the more a large order can slip.
Liquidity is how easily a coin can be bought or sold without moving its price. A liquid market has many buyers and sellers, tight spreads and deep order books, so even large orders fill close to the quoted price. Thin liquidity means wider spreads, more slippage and sharper moves.
Example On Kraken's USD markets, Bitcoin had the most volume (median $144 million a day) and BNB the least ($0.7 million) from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026.
Trading fees are what an exchange charges for each trade, usually a percentage of its value. Many exchanges charge makers, who add orders to the book, less than takers, who fill existing orders. Spreads, withdrawal fees and network fees add to the real cost of every trade.
Read more: Crypto trading fees explained
Spot trading is buying or selling a coin for immediate delivery at the current price: you pay dollars and own the coin outright. There is no borrowing and no expiry date, so the most you can lose is what you paid. It is the opposite of trading with leverage or derivatives.
Example $500 of Bitcoin bought on the spot market at the Oct 10, 2025 close was worth $366.87 a year later, with no margin call or liquidation along the way.
A swap exchanges one coin directly for another, for example ETH for SOL, without selling to dollars first. The rate comes from both coins' current prices, and real platforms build a fee or spread into it. Decentralized exchanges run swaps through smart contracts and liquidity pools.
Read more: How to choose a crypto exchange
A long position is a trade that profits when the price rises: you buy first and sell later. Buying a coin on the spot market is the simplest long. With leverage, a long can be larger than the money you put in, which also gives it a liquidation price below the entry.
Read more: Short selling
Short selling is a trade that profits when the price falls. You open a short at today's price, and if the price drops you close it lower and keep the difference. Losses are the mirror image: every rise costs you, and because a price can keep rising, the loss has no natural ceiling.
Example A $100 short on Bitcoin at 1x, opened at the Oct 10, 2025 close and closed a year later, would have gained $26.63 as the price fell 26.6%.
Leverage lets you open a position larger than the money you put in. At 5x, $100 of margin controls a $500 position, so every 1% move in the price becomes a 5% gain or loss on your margin. It multiplies losses as much as gains and gives the position a liquidation price.
Example Solana's worst day from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, -15.0% on Feb 5, 2026, would have cost a 5x long 74.8% of its margin in one day.
Read more: What is leverage in crypto trading?
Margin is the money you put up to open a leveraged position. It works as collateral: profits and losses are added to it or taken from it, and if losses use it up, the position is liquidated. Margin multiplied by the leverage gives the full size of the position.
Read more: Liquidation
Liquidation is the forced closing of a leveraged position when its losses have used up the margin behind it. Every leveraged trade has a liquidation price: at 5x it sits about 20% from the entry, at 2x about 50%. Once the market reaches it, the position closes and the margin is gone.
Example A 5x long opened at a random daily close from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 hit its liquidation price within 30 days 19% of the time on Bitcoin and 27% on Dogecoin (closes only).
Position sizing is deciding how much money to put into one trade. A common rule is to risk only a small share of the account, often 1% to 2%, between the entry and the stop-loss. The size then follows from that distance, so a wider stop means a smaller position.
Read more: Position size calculator
The risk-reward ratio compares what a trade can lose with what it aims to win. With a stop-loss $50 below the entry and a target $150 above it, the ratio is 1:3. The more reward per unit of risk, the fewer of your trades need to win for the total to come out ahead.
Read more: Crypto risk management
Profit and loss (P&L) is how much a trade or a portfolio has gained or lost. Unrealized P&L is the current result of positions that are still open, measured at the current price. Realized P&L is the result you locked in by closing them, and it no longer changes with the price.
Read more: Profit/loss calculator
Return on investment (ROI) is the gain or loss as a percentage of the money put in: the final value minus the cost, divided by the cost. $500 that grows to $600 is a 20% ROI. It ignores how long the money was tied up, so only compare ROIs over the same period.
Example $500 put into Bitcoin in 52 weekly buys from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 ended at $540.43, an ROI of +8.1%. One $500 buy at the start returned -26.6%.
Read more: Profit/loss calculator
Diversification is spreading money across assets that do not all move together, so one bad performer does less damage. It only works if the assets are not tightly correlated. Most large cryptocurrencies rise and fall with Bitcoin, so holding several of them diversifies less than it seems.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, 6 of the 7 other free-plan coins had a daily correlation with Bitcoin between 0.80 and 0.91. Only TRON stood apart at 0.42.
Read more: How to build a crypto portfolio
Rebalancing is bringing a portfolio back to its target mix after prices have moved it. If you aim for half Bitcoin and half Ethereum and Bitcoin outperforms, you sell some Bitcoin and buy Ethereum to restore the split. It makes you trim winners and add to the coins that lagged.
Read more: How to rebalance a crypto portfolio
Volatility measures how much a price swings. It is usually quoted as annualized volatility: the standard deviation of daily returns, scaled to a year. A coin with 60% annualized volatility moves much more, up and down, than one with 30%. It describes the size of moves, not their direction.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, Cardano had the highest annualized volatility of the eight free-plan coins, 76.2%, and TRON the lowest, 23.7%. Bitcoin's was 44.3%.
Maximum drawdown is the largest fall from a peak to a later low within a period, given as a percentage. A coin that rose to $100, fell to $40 and then recovered had a 60% maximum drawdown. It shows the worst loss someone who bought at the top would have had to sit through.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, Cardano's maximum drawdown was 80.3% and Bitcoin's 49.2%, while TRON never fell more than 16.7% from a peak.
Correlation measures how closely two prices move together, on a scale from -1 to 1. At 1 their daily moves always line up, at 0 there is no link, and at -1 they move in opposite directions. In crypto it is usually measured on daily returns, and most large coins correlate strongly with Bitcoin.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, the daily returns of Bitcoin and Ethereum had a correlation of 0.91, Bitcoin and TRON only 0.42.
Beta measures how strongly a coin reacts to moves in a benchmark, in crypto usually Bitcoin. A beta of 1.5 means the coin moved 1.5% on average for every 1% Bitcoin moved. Correlation says how consistently two coins move together, beta says how big the reaction is.
Example Against Bitcoin's daily moves from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, Cardano had the highest beta, 1.38, and TRON the lowest, 0.22.
Read more: Correlation
The Sharpe ratio measures return per unit of risk: the average return above a risk-free rate, divided by the volatility of those returns. A higher number means more return for each unit of swing. A negative value means the asset returned less than the risk-free rate over the period.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, with a 0% risk-free rate, TRON had the highest Sharpe ratio of the eight free-plan coins, 0.24, and Cardano the lowest, -0.88.
A market correction is a fall of at least 10% from a recent peak. It is a common pullback, usually shorter and shallower than a bear market, which by the usual definition starts at a 20% fall. In crypto, 10% moves come so often that corrections are part of a normal year.
Example Bitcoin had 4 corrections of 10% or more from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, 3 of them deeper than 20%. Cardano had 15.
A bear market is a long stretch of falling prices, usually defined as a drop of 20% or more from a recent high. Sentiment turns negative, volume often fades and rallies tend to be sold. In past crypto bear markets, Bitcoin fell more than 70% from its high.
Example By the 20% rule, 7 of the eight free-plan coins went through a bear market from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026.
Read more: Bull vs bear markets
A bull market is a long stretch of rising prices, often defined as a gain of 20% or more from a recent low, with growing optimism and volume. Even strong bull markets include sharp corrections along the way, and in crypto they have often ended in fast, deep falls.
Read more: Bull vs bear markets
An all-time high (ATH) is the highest price a coin has ever traded at. Traders watch it because no past buyer is sitting on a loss above it, and the distance from the ATH shows how far a coin is from its peak. Its opposite, the all-time low (ATL), is the lowest price ever.
Read more: When is the best time to buy or sell crypto?
Capitulation is the moment in a falling market when many holders give up and sell at almost any price, usually on heavy volume and a sharp drop. It is mostly recognized afterwards: it can look like the bottom of a sell-off, but sometimes the decline carries on after it.
Example Bitcoin's busiest day on Kraken from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 was Feb 5, 2026, when the price moved -13.9% on $817 million of volume.
Read more: Crypto trading psychology
A candlestick chart shows four prices for each period: open, high, low and close (OHLC). The body runs from the open to the close, usually green when the close is higher and red when it is lower. The thin wicks mark the high and the low, so each candle shows the full range.
Example Bitcoin's widest daily candle from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 came on Feb 6, 2026: a range of 17.8% between a high of $71,696 and a low of $60,500.
Read more: How to read crypto charts
Trading volume is the amount of a coin traded over a period, counted in coins or in dollars. High volume means many participants and usually tighter prices. Traders read it next to the price: a move on rising volume is taken as stronger than the same move on thin volume.
Example On Bitcoin's 10 busiest days on Kraken from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, the price moved a median 4.9%, against 1.3% on a typical day.
Support is a price level where falling prices have tended to stop because buyers step in. Resistance is a level where rising prices have tended to stall because sellers appear. Both come from past chart behavior, work as zones rather than exact prices, and break regularly.
Read more: How to read crypto charts
A moving average is the average closing price over a set number of past periods, recalculated every day, so it smooths out the noise of daily moves. A simple moving average (SMA) weights every day the same. An exponential moving average (EMA) gives recent days more weight, so it reacts faster.
Example Bitcoin closed above its 200-day simple moving average on 72 of the 365 days from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026.
A golden cross happens when a shorter moving average, usually the 50-day, crosses above a longer one, usually the 200-day. It shows that recent prices have risen above the longer-term trend. Traders read it as a bullish sign, but it lags: it confirms a rise that has already happened.
Example Bitcoin's 50-day average crossed above its 200-day average on Sep 8, 2026, the only golden cross from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026.
A death cross happens when the 50-day moving average falls below the 200-day moving average. It shows that the recent trend has turned weaker than the longer-term one. It is read as a bearish sign, but like the golden cross it lags, so much of the fall has usually happened by then.
Example Bitcoin's 50-day average fell below its 200-day average on Nov 16, 2025 (window Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026).
The Relative Strength Index (RSI) is a momentum indicator that measures the speed of recent price changes on a scale from 0 to 100, usually over 14 periods. Readings above 70 are called overbought and below 30 oversold. It shows how stretched a move is, not where the price goes next.
Example Bitcoin's daily RSI(14) was below 30 on 22 days and above 70 on 15 days from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026.
Overbought and oversold describe a price that has moved far and fast in one direction. On the RSI, overbought usually means a reading above 70 and oversold one below 30. Neither is a signal on its own: in a strong trend a coin can stay overbought or oversold for weeks.
Example TRON's RSI(14) read above 70 on 39 days from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, more than any other free-plan coin, in a year it ended +2.9%.
Read more: Relative Strength Index (RSI)
MACD (Moving Average Convergence Divergence) is a trend indicator built from two exponential moving averages. The MACD line is the 12-period EMA minus the 26-period EMA, and the signal line is a 9-period EMA of that difference. Crossings of the two lines are read as shifts in momentum.
Example On Bitcoin's daily chart, the MACD line crossed its signal line 28 times from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, 14 times upward and 14 times downward.
Bollinger Bands are three lines drawn around the price: a 20-period moving average in the middle and two bands two standard deviations above and below it. The bands widen when the price swings more and narrow when it calms down, so they show changes in volatility at a glance.
Example Bitcoin closed above its upper band on 19 days and below its lower band on 18 days from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 (20 days, 2 standard deviations).
Average true range (ATR) measures how far a price typically moves in one period, gaps included. A day's true range is the largest of three gaps: high to low, high to the previous close, and low to the previous close. ATR averages it, usually over 14 periods, and is often used to set stop distances.
Example On Oct 10, 2026, Bitcoin's 14-day ATR was $2,125, or 2.56% of its price.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) means investing a fixed amount at regular intervals, for example $10 every week, whatever the price. You buy more coins when the price is low and fewer when it is high, so your average cost evens out. It removes the need to time the market but does not prevent losses.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, $500 in 52 weekly buys ended ahead of one $500 buy for 8 of the eight free-plan coins. For Bitcoin: $540.43 against $366.87.
Read more: Dollar-cost averaging, explained
Lump-sum investing means putting the whole amount in at once instead of spreading it over time. It gives all of the money the full period in the market: it beats dollar-cost averaging when prices rise steadily after the buy and loses to it when prices fall first.
Example In the year to Oct 10, 2026, a $500 lump sum in TRON ended at $514.56 and in Cardano at $189.84.
Read more: DCA calculator
HODL is crypto slang for holding a coin through its ups and downs instead of trading it. It began as a misspelling of "hold" in a 2013 Bitcoin forum post and was later read as "hold on for dear life". A HODLer buys and waits, judging the result over years rather than days.
Example Holding $500 of each free-plan coin from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 ended above $500 for TRON.
Day trading means opening and closing trades within the same day to profit from short price moves, with no position held overnight. It takes time, quick decisions and strict risk control, and fees add up fast. Crypto never closes, so the trading day is whatever window the trader picks.
Example Solana's median daily range, high to low, was 4.55% from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026: the room a day trader had to work with on a typical day.
Read more: Day trading vs swing trading
Swing trading means holding a position for a few days to a few weeks to catch one price swing. Swing traders use charts and indicators to time entries and exits, and they accept moves while they sleep. It needs less screen time than day trading and more attention than buying and holding.
Read more: Day trading vs swing trading
Scalping is the fastest trading style: many very short trades, seconds to minutes long, each aiming for a small gain. It depends on tight spreads, low fees and fast execution, because costs can wipe out such small profits. Most beginners find it the hardest style to do well.
Read more: Day trading vs swing trading
Paper trading means practicing trades with pretend money while following real market prices. You make the same decisions as a real trader, such as what to buy, how much and when to sell, but nothing you lose is real. It is the usual way to learn an app or test a plan before risking money.
Read more: Crypto paper trading
A trading simulator is an app or platform that lets you trade with virtual money at real market prices. It copies the buy and sell flow of a real exchange, tracks your profit and loss, and often adds lessons or competitions. Staxo is a crypto trading simulator for iPhone and Android.
Read more: Crypto trading simulator
Backtesting is checking how a trading rule would have done on past prices before you use it. You define exact entry and exit rules, apply them to historical data and measure the results, losses included. A fair backtest counts fees and avoids rules fitted too closely to the past.
Read more: DCA calculator
An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin. The term covers everything from Ethereum and Solana to stablecoins and meme coins. Most altcoins are more volatile than Bitcoin and have often fallen further in sell-offs, though some have done better than it over certain periods.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, 6 of the 7 altcoins on Staxo's free plan swung harder than Bitcoin.
Read more: What are altcoins?
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady price, usually $1, backed by dollars, short-term government bonds or other assets. Traders use stablecoins such as Tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) to park money between trades without leaving crypto.
Read more: What are stablecoins?
A meme coin is a cryptocurrency that started as an internet joke or community meme rather than to fund a product, such as Dogecoin or Shiba Inu. Its price depends mostly on attention and social media, so meme coins tend to swing much harder than Bitcoin, in both directions.
Example From Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026, Dogecoin's annualized volatility was 67.7% against Bitcoin's 44.3%, and it moved more than 5% on 38 days.
Market capitalization (market cap) is a coin's price multiplied by its circulating supply: the total value of all coins in circulation. It is the usual way to rank cryptocurrencies by size. A low price does not make a coin cheap, because what matters is the price times the number of coins.
Read more: Which cryptocurrency to buy first
Circulating supply is the number of coins currently available to trade. Max supply is the hard limit that can ever exist, such as 21 million for Bitcoin, while some coins, like Dogecoin, have no cap at all. Coins that are locked or not yet issued are not part of the circulating supply.
Read more: What is Bitcoin?
Tokenomics is the economics of a crypto token: how many exist, how new ones are created, who holds them, when locked tokens are released and what the token is used for. Supply schedules matter for the price, because large unlocks or a high issuance rate add selling pressure.
Read more: What are altcoins?
A token burn permanently removes coins from circulation by sending them to an address no one can spend from. Projects burn tokens to reduce supply, sometimes on a fixed schedule: BNB, for example, burns part of its supply every quarter. A smaller supply does not guarantee a higher price.
Read more: BNB trading simulator
A halving is a scheduled cut by half in the reward for mining new blocks. In Bitcoin it happens every 210,000 blocks, roughly every four years, and slows the creation of new coins on the way to the 21 million cap. The most recent Bitcoin halving took place in April 2024.
Read more: What is Bitcoin?
A blockchain is a shared ledger that records transactions in blocks linked in order, each one pointing to the block before it. Copies are kept by many computers, so no single party controls it and past entries are very hard to change. Bitcoin's blockchain, launched in 2009, was the first.
Read more: What is blockchain technology?
A smart contract is a program stored on a blockchain that runs automatically when its conditions are met, with no middleman. Smart contracts power decentralized exchanges, lending apps, stablecoins and NFTs. Ethereum made them popular, and Solana, BNB Chain and Cardano run them too.
Read more: What is Ethereum?
Proof of work is the way networks such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin agree on new blocks: miners race to solve a costly computing puzzle, and the winner adds the next block and earns a reward. The energy this takes makes rewriting past blocks extremely expensive, which is what secures the network.
Read more: What is Bitcoin?
Proof of stake secures a blockchain with locked-up coins instead of mining. Validators stake coins as a deposit, take turns adding blocks, earn rewards and can lose part of the deposit if they cheat. Ethereum, Solana, Cardano and BNB Chain all use a form of proof of stake.
Read more: What is Ethereum?
Staking means locking up coins to help run a proof-of-stake network and earning rewards for it, usually paid in the same coin. Rewards depend on the network and on how much is staked in total. Staked coins still lose value when the price falls, and some networks make you wait to unlock them.
Read more: What is DeFi?
A gas fee is the payment for processing a transaction or running a smart contract on a blockchain such as Ethereum. It is paid in the network's own coin, ETH on Ethereum, and rises when the network is busy. Complex actions like swaps cost more gas than a simple transfer.
Read more: What is Ethereum?
DeFi (decentralized finance) is financial services run by smart contracts instead of banks or brokers: lending, borrowing, trading and earning interest, open to anyone with a crypto wallet. It removes middlemen but adds its own risks, such as code bugs, hacks and very volatile collateral.
Read more: What is DeFi?
An NFT (non-fungible token) is a unique token on a blockchain that records who owns a specific item, such as a piece of digital art, a game item or a ticket. Unlike a bitcoin, which can be swapped for any other bitcoin, each NFT is one of a kind and cannot be exchanged one for one.
Read more: What are NFTs?
A crypto wallet stores the keys that control your coins. The coins themselves stay on the blockchain: the wallet holds the private keys that let you move them. Hot wallets are apps connected to the internet and handy for trading, cold wallets are offline devices that are safer for storage.
Read more: How crypto wallets work
A seed phrase is a list of 12 or 24 words that can restore a crypto wallet and every coin in it. Anyone who has the phrase controls the funds, so it should be written down offline and never typed into a website, shared with anyone or kept in a screenshot or a cloud note.
Read more: How crypto wallets work
A crypto exchange is a platform for buying, selling and swapping cryptocurrencies. Centralized exchanges (CEX) hold your coins and match orders in an order book. Decentralized exchanges (DEX) let you swap straight from your own wallet through smart contracts. Fees, security and coin choice vary widely.
Read more: How to choose a crypto exchange
FOMO (fear of missing out) is the urge to buy because a price is rising fast and everyone else seems to be making money. It pushes traders into late entries near a top, often without a plan or a stop-loss. Writing entry rules down before the market moves is the usual defense.
Read more: Crypto trading psychology
FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) is negative news, rumor or opinion that spreads fear about a coin or the market, whether it is true or not. It can set off panic selling. Careful traders check what can actually be verified before they act on it, and they ignore the rest.
Read more: How to read crypto news
A whale is a person or organization holding so much of a cryptocurrency that their buying or selling can move its price. Traders watch large transfers to exchanges as a possible sign that a whale is about to sell, although a transfer on its own proves nothing about what comes next.
Read more: How to read crypto news
A pump and dump is a scheme in which a group buys a small, thinly traded coin, hypes it to draw in buyers and then sells into the rise, leaving the late buyers with losses. It is illegal in regulated markets and most common with tiny tokens that have very little liquidity.
Read more: Is crypto trading safe for beginners?
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Educational content, not investment advice. The examples describe prices from Oct 10, 2025 to Oct 10, 2026 and say nothing about where they go next. Staxo is a simulator: you practice with demo money, never real money.
