In short
Every term used in this help center, in one place, written in plain words.
Trading has a lot of words that are used as if everyone already knows them. Here is the full list used in this help center. Anywhere you see a word with a dotted underline, you can hover or tap it to read the same explanation without leaving the page.
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Ask price | The price you buy at. It is always the higher of the two prices shown. |
| Balance | The money in your account, not counting trades that are still open. |
| Base currency | The first currency in a pair. In EUR/USD it is the euro. The price tells you what one unit of it costs in the second currency. |
| Bid price | The price you sell at. It is always the lower of the two prices shown. |
| CFD | Contract for difference. An agreement to exchange the change in price of something, without ever owning the thing itself. |
| Close only | A state where an instrument can be closed but no new position can be opened in it. |
| Commission | A fee charged per trade on some account types, worked out from the size of the trade rather than the profit. |
| Credit | Money added to a trading account that can be traded with but cannot be withdrawn as cash until it converts to balance. |
| Drawdown | The largest fall from a high point to a low point in an account, measured as a percentage. |
| Dynamic leverage | A system where the leverage available falls as your position gets bigger. Small positions get the highest leverage, large ones get less. |
| Equity | Your balance adjusted for the profit or loss of your open trades right now. |
| ETF | Exchange traded fund. One traded product that holds a basket of other assets inside it. |
| Ex dividend date | The cut off date for a dividend. Own the share before it and you receive the dividend; buy on or after it and you do not. |
| Expert Advisor | A small program that places trades for you inside MetaTrader 5, following rules that you or someone else wrote. |
| Expiry | The date a futures based contract ends. Spot instruments do not have one. |
| Free margin | The money in your account that is not being held for open trades. It is what you have left to open new trades. |
| GMT | Greenwich Mean Time, a world time standard. Times are written in GMT here so they mean the same thing in every country. |
| Hedging | Holding a buy trade and a sell trade on the same market at the same time. |
| Identity check | The checks a regulated company has to run to confirm who you are before it can hold your money. Also called KYC, short for know your customer. |
| Index | A single number that tracks a group of company shares, such as the 500 largest listed companies in the United States. |
| Introducing broker | A partner who brings new customers to a broker and is paid for the trading those customers do. |
| Investor password | A read only password for a trading account. It shows balances and open trades but cannot place or close anything. |
| Leverage | A setting that lets you open a trade larger than the money in your account. It makes profits bigger and losses bigger by the same amount. |
| Liquidity | How easily something can be bought or sold without its price moving. High liquidity usually means tighter spreads. |
| Long | A trade that makes money if the price goes up. |
| Lot | A standard trade size. One lot of a currency pair is 100,000 units of the first currency in the pair. |
| Margin | The part of your money that is held aside while a trade is open. It is returned to you when the trade closes. |
| Margin call | A warning that your equity has fallen close to the amount being held for your open trades. |
| Margin level | Your equity divided by the margin held for your open trades, written as a percentage. It is the health figure for the account. |
| Market execution | Your order is filled at the best price available at that moment, rather than at a price you name in advance. |
| Multi factor authentication | A second check at sign in, on top of your password. It can be a code by email or text, a code from an app, or a tap in the Tradin app. |
| My Wallet | The holding area in your account area. Money arrives here when you deposit and leaves from here when you withdraw. You cannot trade with money sitting in it. |
| Negative balance protection | A rule that stops your account from falling below zero, so you cannot end up owing money after a sharp market move. |
| Network fee | A charge paid to the blockchain for processing a crypto transaction. It goes to the network, not to Tradin. Also called a gas fee. |
| No dealing desk | Orders go straight to the market rather than through a desk that takes the other side of your trade. |
| Pending order | An instruction to open a trade later, once the price reaches a level you choose. |
| Personal Area | Your account area on the Tradin website. It holds your wallet, your trading accounts, your documents and your settings. |
| Pip | The smallest normal price step in a currency pair. For most pairs it is 0.0001, so a move from 1.1000 to 1.1001 is one pip. |
| Point | The smallest price step for an index, a share or a commodity. It works the same way a pip does for currencies. |
| Scalping | Opening and closing trades within a very short time, often seconds or minutes. |
| Segregated funds | Customer money held in bank accounts kept apart from the company's own money. |
| Server time | The clock used by the trading server, which is GMT+2, and GMT+3 while daylight saving is in effect. Fees that run at the end of the day use this clock, not yours. |
| Short | A trade that makes money if the price goes down. |
| Slippage | The difference between the price you asked for and the price you actually received. |
| Spot CFD | A contract for difference priced for right now, with no expiry date. Every instrument at Tradin is one. |
| Spread | The gap between the buy price and the sell price. You pay it the moment you open a trade, so a trade starts slightly behind. |
| Static leverage | One fixed leverage ratio applied to your whole position, however large it is. |
| Stop loss | An instruction to close a trade by itself if the price moves against you by a set amount. |
| Stop out | The point where the platform starts closing your open trades by itself, because your equity has fallen too low to support them. |
| Support PIN | A short lived code sent to your registered phone that proves who you are when you contact support. |
| Swap | A fee charged, or sometimes paid to you, for keeping a trade open past the end of the trading day. It comes from the difference in interest rates behind the two things you are trading. |
| Take profit | An instruction to close a trade by itself once it reaches a set profit. |
| Tranche | A portion of a position. Margin is worked out portion by portion, each at its own rate, rather than at one rate for the whole trade. |
| Volatility | How much and how quickly a price moves. Higher volatility means larger and faster price swings. |
| VPS | Virtual private server. A computer that stays online all the time, so an automated trading program keeps running when your own device is off. |
| Working day | A day when banks are open. Weekends and public holidays are not working days, so they do not count. |