Stock Market Terms

A practical glossary for active traders, organized from levels and order flow to setups, risk, float dynamics, catalysts, and scanning.

1. Levels & Risk

VWAP: Volume-weighted average price for the session — the default fair-value line on an intraday chart. Holding above it means longs are in control; failing below means shorts are. On VWAP = testing it. Off VWAP = bouncing away from it.
Guide: The price used as risk. Usually VWAP, HOD, LOD, or a whole/half dollar.
HOD / LOD: High of day / low of day. The most common stop and the most common trigger. “Risking to HOD.”
Key area / key level: The support or resistance that decides the next move.
Magnet: A psychological round number the stock gets drawn to — $5, $10, $100.
Over / under: A decision level. Trade the reaction above or below it, not a prediction of which way it goes.
R/G (red / green): Crossing from down-on-day to up-on-day, or the reverse. A sentiment flip, not just a price.
Reject: A failed break of HOD, VWAP, or resistance.
Reclaim: Lost a level, then took it back. The classic “shorts trapped / longs re-empowered” tell.
Close / closer: Price approaching a level that matters.
Risking to: Where the stop sits, mental or hard. “Short, risking to HOD.”
Max stop: A hard account-level stop — especially important off opening wicks.
Halt levels / circuit bands: The prices that trigger a volatility pause. Track them in advance so you are not stuck in a position you cannot exit.
Target / target range: The planned exit zone, set before entry.
Trade plan: Levels written down before the open, not improvised mid-move.
On radar / off radar / revisit later: Watchlist status: setup forming, setup dead, or come back to it.
Support / resistance: Prices where buyers have previously stepped in (support) or sellers have previously capped price (resistance).
AVWAP (anchored VWAP): VWAP measured from a chosen starting point — a gap, halt, or news print — rather than from the open. Shows the average price paid since that event.
Moving average: A rolling average of price over N periods, such as 9, 20, or 200. Used as dynamic support/resistance and a trend filter.
Higher high / higher low: Successive peaks and troughs both rising. The textbook definition of an uptrend.
Lower high / lower low: Successive peaks and troughs both falling. A downtrend — and the structure behind “heavy.”
Trendline: A line connecting successive lows in an uptrend or highs in a downtrend. A moving guide rather than a fixed one.
Prior day high / low: Yesterday’s extremes. Common overnight reference levels and gap targets.

2. Tape & Order Flow

Bid / bidder: A large resting buy order sitting on Level 2.
Swipe: An aggressive lift of the offers — buyers hitting asks.
Swipe test: Does the reclaim get stuffed by real sellers, or hold because it is only shorts covering? The answer tells you whether the move is real.
Slam / stuff: An aggressive hit of the bids — sellers dumping into whatever is there.
Stuff vs. soak: An exhaustion dump that stays heavy (stuffed) versus one that gets bought immediately (soaked). Same candle, opposite meaning.
Push / pull: A short burst up or down that may precede the real move.
Pops: Quick spikes inside a downtrend. The place to sell weakness — as opposed to chasing rips.
Perk / gear / curl: Price starting to lift out of a channel. The earliest sign of a momentum change.
Ramp: A rising move that is not parabolic yet.
Grind: A slow, stubborn drift higher that refuses to break.
Fade / steady fade / non-stop fade: Persistent selling with few bounces, often all session. Do not catch the knife.
Unwind / unwinding: A clean downtrend with almost no bounces at all.
Heavy: Cannot get lift: lower highs, failed follow-through, no bid. A short candidate.
Moving on air / floating on air: Big range on thin volume. Fragile — it can reverse as fast as it moved.
Never breach VWAP: A runner that absorbs every short while holding VWAP the whole way up. Not one to fade.
Circuit-to-circuit: Repeated halt bands, one after another — often while never breaching VWAP and absorbing shorts the entire time.
Circuits / halt: A volatility halt. You cannot exit while it is on. This is the risk that can punish oversized positions.
Thin / low float: Small share supply. Small orders move it a lot.
Volume (as an alert): Relative volume is picking up. The name is in play.
Liquidity vs. volume: Volume can look perfectly fine and still not let you out. They are not the same thing.
No fill: Not enough actual bids or offers to exit at any reasonable price.
Indication: The pre-open indicated price. A stress check on the open, not an entry.
Low liquidity environment: Few competing buyers and sellers, so small orders move price more than they should.
Ask / offer: The lowest price a seller is currently willing to accept. Buying at the ask means paying up.
Spread: The gap between bid and ask. Wide spreads mean thin liquidity and expensive round trips.
Print: A completed trade on the tape. “Big print” means unusual size crossing.
Tape: The live stream of executed trades. Reading the tape means reading speed, size, and who is being aggressive.
Level 2: The order book: resting bids and offers stacked by price and size across market makers and ECNs.
Time and sales: The printed record of every execution — price, size, and timestamp. The companion to Level 2.
ADV (average daily volume): How much a name normally trades. The denominator that makes RVOL meaningful.
RVOL (relative volume): Today’s volume as a multiple of its average. A key “is this in play” filter.
LULD: Limit up / limit down — the price bands that trigger a volatility halt when price moves too far too fast.
Circuit breaker: The mechanism that pauses trading when an LULD band is breached. What “circuits” refers to.
News halt: A halt called for pending news rather than volatility. It reopens at a fresh price with no way to have exited.
Accumulation: Buying absorbed quietly over time without pushing price up. The mirror of distribution.
Supply / demand: Shares available for sale versus buying interest. Every squeeze argument is ultimately a supply argument.
Bid support: Persistent buyers holding a price up. When it disappears, price slides fast.
Offer resistance: A persistent seller capping a price. Absorbing it is what makes a breakout real.

3. Setups & Patterns

ABCDing / ABCD: The classic momentum pattern: run, pullback and base, then the next leg.
Bases / basing: Tight consolidation after a move. The base is the entry — not the first spike.
Failed follow through: A breakout attempt that dies. Often the short trigger itself.
Next leg up / down: The continuation that comes after a base holds.
Fresh highs / fresh lows: New extremes after consolidation. Puts the name back on radar.
Holding trend: Pullbacks or spikes happen, but the day’s direction is intact.
Trending: A one-direction day with low chop.
Squeezing: Upside driven by shorts covering, not by new buyers.
Gapper: Holding overnight after a strong close, betting on morning follow-through.
Washout / wash: A fast flush that hits stops and clears weak holders. The buy is off the wash, not into it.
Flush-out candle: The wick that knocks out everyone who used the low as their risk level.
Hammer candle: The reversal bar that prints after a flush.
V-shape reversal: A violent reclaim after a flush. Repeated V-shapes in the same name are often distribution by price.
Right side of the V: Trade the reclaim after the flush — not the first dump.
Double top: Two failed tests of the same high, often premarket or opening resistance.
Walk-down trap: A premarket or early fade that looks perfectly shortable, then snaps up.
Re-trap: A second trap at a known level, after the first one already burned one side.
Low-volume trap: Looks shortable because volume is light — but price never gives shorts the VWAP or structure break they need.
Dip and rip: Fade, trap the shorts, then squeeze. The core squeeze structure.
Daily slide after daily squeeze: The same name squeezes and then fades, every single session.
PR reject: A news spike that fails. Fade the failed catalyst.
Shuffle: The same pattern repeating across a group of names — one leader’s structure showing up in every sympathy.
Coiled: A compressed range right before expansion.
Rip / ripper / rip stick: A sharp upside burst, in the stock or in the options.
Breakout / breakdown: Price clearing resistance (breakout) or losing support (breakdown) with volume behind it.
Pullback: A countertrend dip inside an uptrend. Generally a better entry than the highs.
Consolidation: A pause where price moves sideways and range contracts. Same idea as a base.
Range: A defined band price keeps oscillating between. Fade the edges until it breaks.
Channel: A sloped range — a trend with parallel upper and lower bounds.
Trend: A persistent direction: higher highs and higher lows, or the reverse.
Reversal: A change in direction that holds. Not to be confused with a bounce inside a trend.
Continuation: The trend resuming after a pause. The other half of every ABCD.
Gap: An overnight price jump — today’s open away from yesterday’s close. The starting condition for many small-cap plays.
Gap fill: Price trading back to yesterday’s close, closing the gap. A common magnet and target.
Gap and go: A gap that holds and extends off the open. The bullish resolution.
Gap and crap: A gap that fails immediately and sells off. The bearish resolution — and the reason to wait past 9:30.
Chop / choppy: Directionless back-and-forth. The condition that stops out both sides.
Trend day: A day that goes one direction and does not look back. Hold, do not scalp.
Range day: A day that oscillates between two levels. Scalp the edges, do not hold for a trend.
Runner: A name that is genuinely running — big percentage move on big relative volume.
Multi-day runner: A runner extending over consecutive sessions. Where float rotation and backside setups live.
Climax / climax top: The final blow-off surge on peak volume, right before the move fails.
Exhaustion: The point where the aggressive side runs out of participants. Precedes the reversal.
Dead-cat bounce: A weak bounce inside an ongoing downtrend that fails and makes new lows.
Bull trap: A breakout that immediately fails, trapping the longs who chased it.
Bear trap: A breakdown that immediately reverses, trapping the shorts who pressed it.
Fakeout: Any break of a level that does not hold. The generic form of both traps.
Wick: The thin part of a candle beyond the body — where price went but could not stay. Where stops get taken.
Shooting star: A long upper wick with a small body. Rejection at the highs.
Doji: Open and close nearly equal. Indecision; only meaningful at an extreme.
Engulfing: A candle whose body fully covers the prior one. A momentum shift in a single bar.
Double bottom: Two failed tests of the same low. The inverse of the double top.

4. Position & Risk

Starter / starting: The first piece. Confirmation comes before real size does.
Adding: Adding to a position that is already working.
Scale / scaling in: Building in pieces so you are never all-in on a guess.
Core position: The day or swing thesis. Scalped around rather than traded whole.
Leaving room: Sizing small enough that a normal wiggle does not stop you out.
Locking in / pay along the way: Taking partials so a winner never turns into a loser.
All done / done w/: Flat. Out of the position entirely.
Chase / chasing: Buying or selling after the move already happened. A mistake unless size is tiny.
Buying on dips: Adding on pullbacks in an uptrend instead of lifting the highs.
Leaning: Slowly building a short into strength and pops, rather than all at once.
Higher better: Let it run so the short is better later — more extension, more trapped longs. The opposite of chasing a short too early.
Put risk on: Actually take the trade, after having waited for it.
Size: Share count or dollars at risk. Size does not always make you more.
Oversize / oversized: Too big for the halt and liquidity risk actually present in the name.
Cover: Buying back a short.
Missed cover / couldn’t fill: You wanted out and there was no liquidity. A known risk accepted before entry — not a surprise.
Long / short / flat: Owning shares (long), having sold borrowed shares (short), or holding nothing (flat).
Scalp: A trade held seconds to minutes for a small, defined move.
Day trade: A position opened and closed within the same session. No overnight risk.
Swing: A position held across multiple sessions on a multi-day thesis.
Average in: Adding at worse prices to improve the blended cost basis. Fine when planned, fatal when it is just hope.
Trim: Selling part of a position while keeping the rest. The mechanic behind “pay along the way.”
Stop / stop out: The exit that caps a loss — and the act of being taken out at it.
Hard stop vs. mental stop: A resting order in the market versus a level you have committed to honor manually. Hard stops can be run; mental stops can be ignored.
Risk / reward: Expected gain measured against the loss you accept to get it. The number that makes a low win-rate strategy work.
R-multiple: Profit or loss expressed in units of your initial risk. A +3R winner made three times what you risked.
Drawdown: The decline from a peak in the account. Measured in dollars and in confidence.
Blow up / blown account: A loss large enough to end the account. Almost always oversize plus a halt.
Margin: Borrowed buying power. It magnifies both sides, and it is what turns a bad trade into a blown account.

5. Squeeze, Float & Borrow

Float: The shares actually available to trade.
Float rotation: Volume trades many times the listed float. Original holders have had every chance to exit, new buyers hold a much higher cost basis, and shorts who keep adding get run over. Once the float rotates, the original gap no longer matters.
Higher the thinner: After a big run and a rotated float, each new high has less real supply behind it. Dangerous to fight.
Front side: The early, still-extending part of the squeeze. Not a place for size.
Back side / backside: After the squeeze clears and longs become the trapped side. Where the short setup actually lives.
Parabolic: A vertical, late-stage run. A backside candidate after it fails — not during.
Add add add: Shorts stacking size into strength out of disbelief. A warning sign, not a plan.
Blow out the shorts: Forcing covers. Price can then run because the flow is covering, not selling.
Stuck / shorts stuck / longs stuck: One side is committed at a bad price. That is the fuel.
SSR: Short sale restriction — the uptick rule that kicks in after a big down day. Changes how shorts are allowed to hit bids.
SSR trap: A walk-down that looks shortable, then rips because shorts are restricted and get trapped.
Locate / borrow: The permission and inventory you need in order to short.
Hard to borrow / HTB: Scarce borrow. Squeeze fuel.
Borrow now, pay later: Shorts get an easy late-day fill, then pay for it after hours when supply thins out.
T+1 / FTD / buy-in: Settlement and failure-to-deliver pressure that can force covers days after the first spike.
Lock shorts in day one: Trap them on day one, then let the squeeze come later — on buy-ins, or on price alone.
Let shorts “win” into the close: The classic late-day fade that makes shorts look right — then after-hours or premarket punishes them.
Rigger / rigger supply: Thin, tightly-held small-cap squeeze vehicles — and the thin after-hours or premarket offer they run shorts into.
Shell game / rigged casino: Labels for what front-siding those names actually amounts to.
Outlier / black swan: A range that should not be possible given the float — unless volume rotated it.
Short interest: The number of shares currently sold short. High short interest is fuel, not a guarantee.
Days to cover: Short interest divided by average daily volume. How long shorts would need to exit at a normal pace.
Utilization: The percentage of available borrow already lent out. Near 100% means the next short pays up or cannot get in.
Borrow fee / locate fee: What you pay to short a hard-to-borrow name. A rising fee is a real-time squeeze-pressure gauge.
Restricted float: Shares that exist but cannot trade — insider lockups or unregistered stock. Shrinks the real tradable supply.
Outstanding shares: Every share issued, including restricted ones. Always larger than the float.
Reg SHO: The SEC rule set governing short sales, locates, and failures to deliver. The source of SSR and the threshold list.
Settlement: When a trade legally completes and shares change hands — now T+1. The clock behind buy-ins.
Short squeeze: Price rising because shorts are forced to buy back, which pushes it higher and forces more covering.
Gamma squeeze: Option dealers buying stock to hedge calls they have sold, which pushes price up and forces more hedging. Stacks on top of a short squeeze.
Delta: How much an option’s price moves per $1 in the stock. Also how many shares a dealer must hold to stay hedged.
Gamma: How fast delta changes as the stock moves. High gamma is why dealer hedging accelerates into a run.
Naked short: Shorting without securing a borrow. Often used loosely as shorthand for supply that should not exist.

6. Crowd & Psychology

Risk on / risk off: Is the tape rewarding aggression or punishing it? The regime question — and it matters more than any individual setup.
Scale tips: Which crowd is getting stuck. When the scale tips, the next move is violent.
Crowded: Too many people in the same idea. Crowded short means squeeze risk; crowded long means air-pocket risk.
Trap: One side is committed at a bad price. The squeeze or dump that follows is the payoff.
Chase it all: Late, sloppy risk-on across the board. A warning, not an invitation.
Distribution by price: Selling into strength and V-reversals that dump longs at the highs.
Distribution by time: After the spike, the move just dies as volume fades. No crash required.
FUD: Fear, uncertainty, doubt. A coordinated wave of it sometimes turns out to be cover for accumulation.
In play: Volume plus range. Worth watching today.
A+ setup: The highest-conviction, pre-planned idea from the scan. Usually the only kind worth sizing before the open.
Theme: The tape’s current recipe — after-hours squeezes following late-day short wins, repeat-name V’s, or whatever is working that week.
Sympathy / sympathies: Related names that move with the leader. Often a cleaner trade than the leader itself.
Basket / names: A group of related tickers — memory, shipping, meme, and so on.
Relative strength / weakness: One name leading or lagging the rest of its basket.
Stay in your lane: Do not copy someone else’s size or someone else’s style.
FOMO: Chasing because other people are printing.
Conviction vs. risk: High conviction with poor risk still kills you. The two are separate questions.
Gamified tape: The modern small-cap tape — structured, more than ever, to trap whichever side is crowded.
Career-risk event: The trade that can end an account rather than just a day: a halt you cannot exit, a gap against oversize, or a squeeze with no borrow left.
Graduate / bigger size: Leaving small-cap casino size behind for mid- and large-cap, where liquidity actually lets you out.
You only need to get rich once: Keeping it beats chasing the next small cap.
The house will win: Stay at the small-cap table long enough and it takes the money back.
Pump: Coordinated or promotional buying that inflates price on no real change in the business.
Dump: The exit that follows a pump, into the buyers it attracted.
Pump and dump: The full cycle. The structural reason non-organic volume is borrowed, not owned.
Bagholder: Whoever is left holding at the top after the crowd leaves.
Paper hands / diamond hands: Selling quickly versus refusing to sell. Meme-tape framing — descriptive, not advice.
BTFD: “Buy the dip.” Crowd shorthand for the reflex that works right up until the trend actually breaks.

7. Session & Timing

Premarket (PM): Pre-9:30 action, where many traps and ideas start. Rarely a place for size unless the setup is A+.
Open / opening wicks: The first minutes. Lethal if you are oversized.
9:30–9:45 / 10:00: The reactive window. Do not commit — re-evaluate against VWAP once it settles.
Midday / 11:30 check-in: If names are not doing what you expected by now, get smaller or get out.
Power hour / EOD / into the close: Last-hour volatility: ramps, dumps, and late-day positioning games.
After hours (AH): The post-4:00 tape. Thinner, easier to squeeze or slide. A favorite squeeze window.
Hold overnight / swing idea: A multi-session thesis, not a scalp.
Opening print: The first official trade of the regular session. The reference point everything early gets measured against.
Opening drive: A strong directional push straight off the open that does not retrace. Rare and hard to fade.
Morning panic: A sharp flush in the first hour that clears weak holders. Often where the day’s low prints.
Afternoon slump: The midday-to-early-afternoon liquidity lull. Ranges tighten and fills get worse.
Overnight inventory: Positions carried through the after-hours and premarket session. Determines who is already trapped at the open.
Imbalance: Excess buy or sell interest published ahead of the close. Drives the last-minute move into 4:00.
MOC / LOC: Market-on-close and limit-on-close orders. They execute at the closing auction and create the imbalance.
Settle / the close: The official closing price. What R/G, gaps, and overnight P&L are all measured against.
Intraday vs. daily chart: Timeframes. The daily chart sets the thesis; the intraday chart sets the entry and risk.

8. Catalysts & Corporate

PR / news / catalyst: The press release or headline driving the gap.
Puts / calls: Options. “Fade puts,” “parabolic index calls.”
FOMC: Fed day. The first parabolic move after the announcement is often the one that fails.
Forward split: A share split that changes the chart math and resets visual reference points.
IPO / new issue: No history and real halt risk. No size unless it was planned.
Meme / meme tape: Crowd-driven tape where positioning outweighs fundamentals. It can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Dilution / offering: New shares hitting the market — the supply that ends many small-cap runs.
Offering: A company selling new shares. Direct supply hitting the market — a common way a small-cap run ends.
ATM offering: An at-the-market program that lets a company sell shares continuously into strength. Invisible, constant supply.
S-1 / S-3: Registration filings that let a company sell new stock. An S-3 shelf can be drawn on with little warning.
Shelf: Pre-registered shares a company can issue whenever it wants. A loaded gun sitting over the chart.
Reverse split: Consolidating shares to lift the price — usually to keep a listing. Shrinks the float, which is why post-reverse-split names can squeeze.
Ticker change: A new symbol, often after a merger or reverse split. Breaks chart history and scanner memory.
Promotion: Paid campaigns pushing a stock. Non-organic demand with a known expiry.

9. Market Context

Small cap / mid cap / large cap: Risk buckets. Size rules, liquidity, and halt risk differ in each.
SPY / QQQ / IWM: The S&P 500, Nasdaq 100, and small-cap index ETFs. The market backdrop that sets whether risk is on.
Sector: The industry group a name belongs to. Sector strength is what turns one runner into a basket.
Correlation: How tightly two names move together. High correlation means your positions are one bet, not several.
Beta: How much a name moves relative to the broad market. High beta amplifies both directions.
Breadth: How many names are participating, not just how the index looks. Narrow breadth is a fragile tape.
Macro: Rates, inflation, and policy — the conditions that set overall risk appetite.
CPI: The monthly inflation print. A scheduled volatility event that resets risk-on/risk-off.
Earnings: Quarterly results. A scheduled catalyst with a known date and an unknown reaction.
Guidance / beat / miss: Forward outlook, and results above or below expectations. Guidance usually moves the stock more than the beat does.
Rumor: Unconfirmed news moving price. Trade the reaction, not the claim.
Market cap: Share price times shares outstanding. The number that makes an outlier move look absurd on paper.

10. Scanning & Flow Sources

Organic vs. non-organic: Real buyers versus alert-service buyers.
Chat pump / newsletter: Third-party alert flow. Non-organic buyers sell together, so the same shares come right back for sale.
Scanner: Software surfacing names by volume, percentage move, or float. Where the day’s candidates come from.
Alert: An automated or posted notification that a name hit a condition. A prompt to look, never a reason to buy.
Gainer / most active: Standard scan lists — biggest percentage movers and highest-volume names.
Watchlist: The curated shortlist you actually trade from, built the night before.