Trading Glossary

Take a look at our list of the financial terms associated with trading and the markets.
CAD

Canada's legal tender is one of the eight major currencies. 

Candlestick Chart

A common chart used in financial market analysis, a chart consists of hundreds of candlesticks. A candle line consists of four prices, namely High, Low, Close and Open. 

Carry Trade

Generally, refers to the spread transaction on foreign exchange, by borrowing money in a country with a low interest rate, replacing it with the currency of a higher interest rate country, and then lending to earning the spread, such as the previous purchase of AUDJPY, which is a typical carry transaction.  The risks of such a carry trade is mainly due to possible interest rates and exchange rate changes, and secondly, the cost of tax burdens in the countries concerned.  

Cash Flow

Cash flow includes not only cash in hand, but also bank deposits, cash equivalents, and highly liquid assets. Cash flow is an important part of the operation of modern companies, refers to the general term for the cash inflow, outflow and stock generated by the enterprise through economic activities in a certain period of time (generally quarterly, semi-annual or annual). Tends to appear in the cash flow statement, similar in structure to the income statement, but expressed differently in terms of dimensions. Cash flow can reflect the company's recent liquidity pressures.  

Central Bank

A country's central bank is an important financial center and an important institution used by the state to regulate and intervene in the national economy. Regulate market liquidity through monetary policy, such as adjusting interest rates, to achieve economic stimulus or cooling. In addition, the credit policy and supervision of commercial banks are also controlled by the central bank. 

CHF

The legal tender of Switzerland and Liechtenstein, issued by the Swiss National Bank, is one of the eight major currencies. 

Commitments of Traders Report

There are three categories of traders' positions held in the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which lists the holdings of various U.S. futures market participants: commercial positions, non-commercial positions (large investors), and non-reported positions (small speculators), which can be used as an indicator to analyze market sentiment. 

Commodity

In the financial market, it refers to homogenization, can be traded, and is widely used in industrial and agricultural production and consumer commodities, including crude oil, iron, aluminum, coal, soybeans, pork, etc. Commodities can be roughly divided into three categories, namely energy, basic raw materials and agricultural and sideline products. It is important to note that physical commodity movement is not involved when trading commodity CFDs. 

Commodity Channel Index

A common technical indicator that measures the deviation of a commodity's price from its average price. Its value often fluctuates between +100 and -100, if applied to more consolidated commodities, when the CCI value is higher than 100, it means that it is overbought, which means that there may be short-term opportunities, on the contrary, when the CCI value is lower than -100, it means that it is oversold, which means that there may be long opportunities in the short term. 

Commodity Futures Trading Commission

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is an independent body created by the United States government in 1974 to regulate the derivatives market in the United States, including futures, swaps, and certain types of options, to protect market participants from fraud, market manipulation, and improper operations related to commodity and financial futures, and to ensure the openness, competitiveness and financial reliability of the futures and options markets.  

Commodity Trading Advisor

A U.S. financial regulatory term that refers to an individual or institution that charges or makes a profit for the provision of advisory advice. The advisory services provided include the execution of trading authorizations for the client's account and the provision of valuable advice based on the client's specific commodity account, commodity trading activity, or other similar information. Commodity trading advisors must be registered with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and must be members of the National Futures Association if managing clients' accounts or advising clients. 

Completeness

When auditing the company's finances, requiring the company to disclose all relevant information completely is an important part of the audit evaluation. 

Consumer Price Index

The CPI contains a fixed basket of goods and services, reflecting all the prices related to the lives of the country's residents, such as rent, oil prices and medicines to name a few. The prices of these goods and services are combined to the so-called consumer prices, which can also be said to be the amount of money needed by an ordinary person to live. In this case we are looking at price changes from the buyer's point of view.

Contagious effect

Refers to the crisis of the economy and situation of a country or economy that spreads to other countries and becomes the trigger of the global financial crisis. With the development of economic globalization, the ties between countries have become closer and closer, and often when a crisis occurs in one country, it will be transmitted to other countries like dominoes. For example, the origin of the entire European debt crisis is the Greek debt crisis. 

Continuation Diamond

It is composed of two triangles, the enlarging triangle and the convergence triangle, and the price volatility first expands and then decreases. The two triangles enclose the shape of a diamond. This pattern represents trading sentiment, first it expands and then contracts. When the candlestick breaks through the diamond pattern, there will be a price trend. 

Continuation Pattern

Refers to a pattern in which the price is suspended in a trend market, and the price continues to run along the original trend after the end of the relay pattern. There are many kinds of relay patterns, such as triangle convergence patterns, flag shapes, wedge shapes, box shapes, etc. Trend-driven signals are often driven by a breakout of the relay pattern. 

Continued Claims

The number of U.S. jobless claims is part of the employment performance report, which refers to the number of people who have continued to apply for unemployment benefits in the past week, reflecting the unemployment situation in the United States during the week. In principle, Americans can claim unemployment benefits for26 consecutive weeks, and the situation will vary from state to state. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. has relaxed the renewal cycle to 39 weeks. It is generally released every Wednesday.  

Contract For Difference

CFDs are derivative products that enable you to make high-risk investments in financial markets such as stocks, forex, indices, and commodities without having to own the underlying asset. CFDs make it easy for traders to trade in the long-short direction, and the source of the trader's profit depends on the difference in the price of the asset between the opening of the contract and the end of the contract.  

Core PCE Price Index

After excluding the price index of food and energy, since the price of food and energy tends to be more volatile, the core PCE tends to be more stable than the PCE price index, and the relationship between the two indicators is the same as that between the core CPI and the CPI.

Counterparty

The other party in a financial transaction, the two parties in the transaction are each other's counterparties. For example, if you are a buyer, then the counterparty is the seller. 

Counterparty Currency

Refers to the latter in a currency pair. For example, the Aussie dollar against the US Dollar (AUDUSD), the counterpart currency of the AUD is the USD.

Country Risk

Risks involving national politics, climatic conditions, international relations, import and export trade, etc., are collectively referred to as geopolitical risks. In international investment or foreign exchange trading, geopolitical risk is a link that cannot be ignored. 

Credit Bureau

It is a kind of institution that specializes in collecting and researching personal credit information and synthesizing this information into a well-organised credit report. Banks and lending institutions will use these credit reports to assess the credit limit of borrowers, approve loans and other items. At present, the three major credit reporting agencies in the United States are Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.  

Credit Rating

A credit rating or score is assigned to any entity that wants to borrow money. This can be an individual, a corporation, a state or provincial authority, or a sovereign government. Credit ratings and other scoring codes are also used by different credit rating agencies. The lower the credit rating, the higher the financing cost that the borrower needs to bear, and conversely, the higher the credit rating, the lower the financing cost. Credit ratings are expressed in letters like AAA, BB+, or D.  

Credit Rating Agency

Companies that specialize in providing reports on debt issuers (e.g. banks, corporations, governments) are able to meet their obligations to pay interest on bonds and repay principal when they mature after bond issuance. At present, the three major international credit rating agencies are Standard & Poor’s (S&P), Moody’s and Fitch Ratings. 

Cross Currency Pair

Among the eight major currencies, all combinations except straight currencies are cross-traded currency pairs. Compared to straight currency pairs, crosses are slightly less liquid and spreads are relatively higher. For example, the Eurasian currency pair, the Australian and New Zealand currency pairs and so on. 

Cross Rate

In the international market, almost all currencies have an exchange rate against the US dollar. The exchange rate of one non-dollar currency against another non-dollar currency often needs to be arbitraged through these two exchange rates against the united States dollar, and the exchange rate calculated by this set is the cross exchange rate.  

Cryptocurrency

A medium of exchange that uses cryptographic principles to ensure transaction security and controls the creation of trading units. Cryptocurrency anti-counterfeiting is a new type of token that uses digital currencies and virtual currencies to use cryptography and digital hashing and binding for smart contracts. Bitcoin became the first decentralized cryptocurrency in 2009, after which the term cryptocurrency refers to such designs. 

Cryptocurrency address 

A string of characters consisting of numbers and letters, used to access the transmission of cryptocurrency transactions and payments, often needs to be accompanied by a corresponding private password. Bitcoin strings have 2 6-35 characters and usually start with 1 or 3; Ethereum, on the other hand, has 40 characters, starting with 0x.  

Currency Manipulator

It generally refers to excessive interference by national governments in exchange rates in order to manipulate the value of local currencies against other countries' currencies, rather than allowing currencies to fluctuate freely according to market dynamics. The premise of currency manipulation is that countries must have mechanisms for opening their markets and floating exchange rates. Exchange rate adjustment is a conventional monetary policy, but excessive interference and the derivation of unequal trade are exchange rate manipulation. 

Currency Pair

Currencies in forex trading appear in pairs, so forex trading is also known as currency pair trading. A currency pair is a foreign exchange rate consisting of two currencies, such as the euro against the US DOLLAR, which is the European and American currency pairs. The former is the base currency and the latter is the list currency. 

Currency Peg

A foreign exchange monetary policy, the national currency and the formulation of the country's currency exchange rate to fix, so as to achieve the purpose of stabilizing import and export trade. Since the US dollar is the settlement currency of most international commodities, it enters the market and is pegged to the currencies of other countries. 

Currency Policy

A country's central bank uses tools to promote growth/limit growth in  the economy by changing the liquidity of money in the market to regulate inflation, employment, economic activity, etc. There are two forms of monetary policy, one is called easing, that is, to put liquidity into the market; The other is tightening, withdrawing liquidity from the market. In general, loose monetary policy will increase the amount of local currency in the market, resulting in the depreciation of the local currency; Vice versa. Compared with fiscal policy, there are not many monetary policy tools, mainly relying on interest rate adjustment and asset purchases, and the impact on the market is more direct.