Glossary

Market Terms

These are in regard to price, market movement, and charting.

Bull Market / Bullish

The market has positive sentiment and there is more buying going on than selling. Generally, if a market is bullish, the market is going up.

Bull Trap

A bull trap is a false signal indicating that a declining trend in a stock or index has reversed and is heading upwards when, in fact, the security will continue to decline. The move “traps” traders or investors that acted on the buy signal and generates losses on resulting long positions

Bear Market / Bearish

Opposite of a Bull Market. The market has negative sentiments. More selling than buying.

Bear Trap

A bear trap is a false signal that the rising trend of a stock or index has reversed when it has not. A bear trap prompts traders to place shorts on the stock or index, since they expect the underlying to decline in value. However, instead of declining further, the investment stays flat, or slightly recovers.

A bear trap is the opposite of a bull trap.

Dead Cat Bounce

A small recovery after a price drop. Can sometimes lead to further price drops, similar to a Bull Trap.

Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA)

Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is an investment technique of buying a fixed dollar amount of a particular investment on a regular schedule, regardless of the share price. The investor purchases more shares when prices are low and fewer shares when prices are high.

The DCA technique does not guarantee that an investor won’t lose money on investments. Rather, it is meant to allow investment over time instead of investment as a lump sum.

FA - Fundamental Analysis

Fundamental analysis is a method of evaluating a security in an attempt to measure its intrinsic value, by examining related economic, financial and other qualitative and quantitative factors.

ROI - Return On Investment

A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. ROI measures the amount of return on an investment relative to the investment’s cost. To calculate ROI, the benefit (or return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment, and the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.

Short / Shorting

Selling coins on margin (i.e., borrowing from the exchange), in anticipation of a price drop. VERY RISKY.

TA - Technical Analysis

Technical analysis is a trading tool employed to evaluate securities and attempt to forecast their future movement by analyzing statistics gathered from trading activity, such as price movement and volume. Unlike fundamental analysts who attempt to evaluate a security’s intrinsic value, technical analysts focus on charts of price movement and various analytical tools to evaluate a security’s strength or weakness and forecast future price changes.

Slang Terms

These are in regard to how crypto traders talk to one another regarding many aspects of crypto.

ATH - All Time High

The highest the price for a certain cryptocurrency has ever been.

AltCoin / Alts

Coins that are said to be alternatives to Bitcoin. Has somewhat lost its meaning as Bitcoin has lost dominance and the number of coins has grown exponentially.

ASIC - Application-Specific Integrated Circuit

An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use.

Quite simply, ASICs allow you mine cryptocurrencies that are not ASIC-resistant at a much faster rate than mining with a graphics card or CPU.

Fiat

Fiat money is currency that a government has declared to be legal tender, but it is not backed by a physical commodity. The value of fiat money is derived from the relationship between supply and demand rather than the value of the material that the money is made of. Historically, most currencies were based on physical commodities such as gold or silver, but fiat money is based solely on the faith and credit of the economy.

Fiat is Latin for “Let it be”.

Fiat is seen as the opposite or competitor of crypto.

FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out

Fear of missing out, or FOMO, causes investors to make bad decisions because they worry that another strategy would produce better investment results.

Fork / Forking

A split in the blockchain that results in two seperate coins. Usually done due to a community split or for large, mandatory upgrades.

FUD

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Characteristics of inexperienced traders and investors, and if someone is trying to cause a bear market, they are said to be “spreading FUD”.

HODL

A mispelling of “hold” that has become a mantra of those looking to hold through adversity and the volatility associated with crypto. Can also be said to stand for, “Hold On for Dear Life”

ICO - Initial Coin Offering

A type of crowdfunding. Oftentimes, ICOs are priced much lower than the price they end up trading for, so they are have extremely high ROI if you can get into a successful one, but they are VERY RISKY.

Market Cap / MCAP / Cap

The market capitalization of a coin, indicating its size and “rank” compared to other cryptocurrencies. Generally, the larger the market cap, the more successful the coin is viewed. 

MasterNode

An advanced PoS (Proof Of Stake / Staking) method that requires a very large amount of a coin. For example, DASH requires 1000 DASH coin for a masternode, and WTC requires 5000. Once a masternode status is achieved, the return on investment is much better.

For example, a DASH masternode can expect to earn $40,000 a year in returns from their dividends alone. The benefit of masternodes to the network is that it provides network stability and disincentivizes masternode holders from selling, which in turn makes attacks to the network much harder to perform.  

Moon / Mooning

Anticipation or reaction to upward price movement, where the price is said to be going “to the moon”

PoS - Proof Of Stake / Staking

Proof Of Stake is a type of algorithm by which a cryptocurrency blockchain network aims to achieve distributed consensus. In PoS-based cryptocurrencies the creator of the next block is chosen via various combinations of random selection and wealth or age.

Essentially, it is an alternative to Proof Of Work. It allows you to receive dividends based on how much of a coin you have.

PoW - Proof Of Work / Mining

A proof-of-work (PoW) system (or protocol, or function) is an economic measure to deter denial of service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from the service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer.

 

Essentially, it means turning your computer into a mining machine, or buying an ASIC that outperforms any computer you could build.

PnD / P&D / Pump And Dump

A collective action by a group to pick a coin, rapidly buy it to drive outside attention and buying, and then sell before they get stuck with the coin when it “dumps” back down to its original price or worse. This is ILLEGAL and is something dumb money participates in.