Education
The vocabulary, defined plainly
Every term a Dynasty Markets page uses, explained the way you would want it explained — mechanism first, jargon last.
A
- Ask
- The price at which you can buy an instrument — always the higher side of the quote.
B
- Balance
- The cash in your account excluding any open-position profit or loss. It changes only when a trade closes or funds move.
- Base currency
- The first currency in a pair. In EURUSD, the euro is the base: the quote states how many US dollars one euro buys.
- Bear market
- A sustained period of falling prices, usually defined as a decline of 20% or more from a recent high.
- Bid
- The price at which you can sell an instrument — the lower side of the quote.
- Breakout
- A price move beyond a level that previously contained it, often followed by increased volatility in the breakout direction.
- Bull market
- A sustained period of rising prices, the opposite of a bear market.
C
- Candlestick
- A chart element showing the open, high, low, and close of a period. Its body and wicks summarise the session's range at a glance.
- CFD
- Contract for difference — an agreement to exchange the change in an instrument's price between opening and closing a position, settled in cash, without owning the underlying asset.
- Commission
- A fixed fee charged per lot traded on raw-spread accounts, quoted per side (opening and closing are charged separately).
- Contract size
- The amount of the underlying asset one standard lot represents — for example 100,000 units of base currency in forex or 100 ounces of gold.
- Currency pair
- Two currencies quoted against each other. Trading a pair means buying one currency and selling the other simultaneously.
D
- Day trading
- Opening and closing positions within the same session so that nothing is held overnight and no swap applies.
- Drawdown
- The decline from an account's peak value to its subsequent low — a measure of how deep losses ran before recovery.
E
- Equity
- Balance plus the floating profit or loss of open positions. This is the live value of your account at any instant.
- Execution
- The completion of an order: the moment your instruction becomes a filled trade at a specific price.
- Expert Advisor (EA)
- A program that trades automatically inside MetaTrader according to rules its author defined. EAs act only while the platform is running and connected.
- Exposure
- The total market value your open positions control — with leverage, usually far larger than the margin securing it.
F
- Fill
- The price at which an order actually executes. It can differ from the requested price when the market moves in between.
- Free margin
- Equity minus the margin locked by open positions — the amount available for new trades or to absorb losses.
- Fundamental analysis
- Assessing an instrument's direction from economic data, interest rates, earnings, and news rather than from its chart.
G
- Gap
- A jump between one price and the next with no trading in between, typically over a weekend or around major news. Gaps can carry price straight through stop levels.
- Going long
- Buying an instrument in the expectation that its price will rise. Profit accrues as the price climbs above your entry.
- Going short
- Selling an instrument you do not hold, expecting its price to fall, aiming to buy it back cheaper. Losses grow if the price rises instead.
- GST (Gulf Standard Time)
- The UAE time zone, UTC+4, in which this site states all trading hours. GST does not observe daylight saving; overseas session times shift twice a year relative to it.
H
- Hedging
- Holding buy and sell positions in the same instrument at once, so that one offsets the other while you decide or protect an exposure.
I
- Index
- A number tracking a basket of assets — the Dow Jones 30 follows 30 large US companies. Index CFDs trade the basket's level without touching its components.
- Instrument
- Anything tradable on the platform: a currency pair, a metal, an index, a commodity, or a share CFD.
L
- Leverage
- Trading with borrowed exposure: at 1:100, each unit of margin controls one hundred units of position. Gains and losses are both measured on the full position, not the margin.
- Limit order
- An instruction that executes only at your stated price or better — buying below the current price or selling above it.
- Liquidity
- How easily an instrument trades in size without moving its price. High liquidity generally means tighter spreads and steadier fills.
- Lot
- The standard unit of trade size. One forex lot is 100,000 units of base currency; fractional lots let you trade a hundredth of that.
M
- Margin
- The deposit locked to keep a leveraged position open. It is collateral, not a cost — released when the position closes.
- Margin call
- A warning that equity has fallen to the point where open positions are at risk of forced closure unless you add funds or reduce exposure.
- Margin level
- Equity divided by used margin, shown as a percentage. Platforms use it to trigger margin calls and stop-outs.
- Market order
- An instruction to execute immediately at the best available price. Speed is guaranteed; the exact fill price is not.
- MetaTrader 5 (MT5)
- A widely used trading platform for charting, order management, and automated strategies, available on desktop, web, and mobile.
N
- Negative balance protection
- A safeguard resetting a retail account to zero if losses ever exceed its funds — you cannot owe more than you deposited.
O
- Overnight position
- Any position still open at the daily rollover point. It continues into the next session and incurs a swap.
P
- Pending order
- An order waiting for the market to reach a chosen price before it activates — limits and stops are both pending orders.
- Pip
- The standard increment of a currency quote — 0.0001 for most pairs, 0.01 for yen pairs. Spreads and price moves are counted in pips.
- Pip value
- What one pip of movement is worth in money for a given position size. It converts price distance into profit or loss.
- Position
- An open trade — long or short — from entry until it is closed.
Q
- Quote currency
- The second currency in a pair, in which the price is expressed. In EURUSD, prices are stated in US dollars.
R
- Range
- A period in which price oscillates between identifiable upper and lower bounds without breaking either.
- Raw spread
- A spread passed through close to interbank pricing with little or no markup; the broker's compensation comes from a separate commission instead.
- Requote
- A dealer response offering a new price because the requested one is no longer available. Market-execution models fill at the current price instead of requoting.
- Resistance
- A price area where rising markets have repeatedly stalled — sellers historically outweigh buyers there.
- Risk management
- The discipline of sizing positions and placing stops so that no single trade or losing streak can do serious damage to the account.
- Rollover
- The daily point at which positions carry into the next trading day and swaps are applied — typically at 01:00 GST.
S
- Scalping
- A style built on many short-lived trades capturing small price moves, where spreads and execution speed dominate the economics.
- Slippage
- The difference between an order's requested and filled price, caused by market movement mid-execution. It can favour or cost you.
- Spread
- The gap between bid and ask — the built-in cost of entering a trade, measured in pips.
- Stop-loss
- A pre-set exit that closes a losing position at a chosen level, converting an open-ended risk into a defined one. Fills can slip in fast markets.
- Stop-out
- Forced closure of positions by the platform when margin level falls to the stop-out threshold, protecting the account from deeper losses.
- Support
- A price area where falling markets have repeatedly held — buying interest historically absorbs the selling there.
- Swap
- The overnight interest adjustment on a held position, reflecting the rate differential between the two sides of the trade. It can be charged or credited.
- Swap-free account
- An account type that replaces interest swaps with a disclosed fixed fee after a set holding period, designed for clients whose faith prohibits interest.
T
- Take-profit
- A pre-set exit that closes a winning position at a chosen level, banking the gain without requiring you to watch the screen.
- Technical analysis
- Reading price charts — patterns, levels, indicators — to assess where a market may move next, on the premise that price reflects available information.
- Tick
- A single price update from the market — the smallest unit of price change the platform records.
- Trailing stop
- A stop-loss that follows a profitable position at a fixed distance, locking in gains while leaving room for the move to continue.
V
- Volatility
- How widely and quickly a price swings. Higher volatility means larger potential moves in both directions and typically wider spreads.