Two honest sentences per term — enough to actually understand it, short enough to remember. New terms are added continuously as the curriculum grows.
A candlestick shows four prices for one period — open, close, high and low — as a body with wicks. The body shows who won that period (buyers or sellers); the wicks show how far the losing side managed to push before being rejected.
Related: Lesson 10 — Reading Japanese candlesticks
Support is a price area where buying has repeatedly stopped declines; resistance is where selling has repeatedly stopped rallies. They are zones, not exact lines — and the more times a level is tested, the more attention it attracts, for both bounces and breaks.
Related: Lesson 12 — Support and resistance
Leverage lets you control a position larger than your capital by borrowing from the exchange — 10x leverage means a 1% move changes your equity by roughly 10%. It amplifies losses exactly as fast as gains, and past a threshold the exchange forcibly closes (liquidates) your position.
Related: Lesson 7 — Leverage and margin · Lesson 30 — Safe leverage
Position sizing is calculating how much to buy or sell so that if your stop-loss is hit, you lose only a fixed small percentage of your account — commonly 1–2%. It is the single practice that most separates traders who survive from traders who don't.
Related: Lesson 27 · Position size calculator
A stop-loss is a pre-placed order that closes your position automatically at the price where your trade idea is proven wrong. Placed correctly, it converts an unlimited risk into a known, chosen cost of doing business.
Related: Lesson 28 — Stop losses done right
Risk/reward compares what you stand to lose at your stop against what you aim to gain at your target — risking $100 to make $300 is 1:3. With a good ratio you can be wrong more often than right and still be profitable, which is why it matters more than win rate.
Related: Lesson 25 — Risk/reward beats win rate
Liquidity is how much can be bought or sold at a given price without moving it. High liquidity means tight spreads and clean fills; low liquidity means slippage — and clusters of stop-losses form "liquidity pools" that larger players are drawn to.
Related: Lesson 8 · Lesson 20 — Liquidity in SMC
A market maker continuously quotes both buy and sell prices, earning the spread while providing the liquidity everyone else trades against. They are not out to hunt you personally — but their inventory management explains many of the sharp wicks that touch obvious stop levels.
Related: Lesson 4 — How the crypto market works
Drawdown is the decline from your account's peak to its lowest point after — a 50% drawdown needs a 100% gain just to break even. Managing drawdown is why professionals risk small: the math of recovery is brutally asymmetric.
Related: Lesson 29 — Drawdown limits
Fear of missing out is the urge to enter a move that has already happened because everyone seems to be profiting from it. It reliably produces the worst entries on the chart — late, unplanned and oversized — which is why it gets its own lesson.
Related: Lesson 31 — FOMO
The order book is the live list of all outstanding buy orders (bids) and sell orders (asks) at each price level. Reading its depth tells you where liquidity actually sits — and how far your market order will move the price.
Related: Lesson 8 · liquidity
The spread is the gap between the highest price buyers will pay and the lowest price sellers will accept. It is an invisible fee you pay on every round trip — tight on BTC, wide on small altcoins, and wider still in volatile moments exactly when you want out.
Related: Lesson 8 — Liquidity and spread
Slippage is the difference between the price you expected and the price your order actually filled at, caused by thin liquidity or fast markets. Market orders in a crash can slip several percent — one reason stop-losses should be placed, not improvised.
Related: Lesson 6 — Order types
On perpetual futures, funding is a periodic payment between longs and shorts that keeps the contract price tied to spot. Persistently positive funding means longs are paying to stay in — a crowded-trade signal that often precedes violent unwinds.
Related: Deep dive: liquidation cascades
Open interest (OI) is the total value of derivative positions currently open. Rising OI with rising price means new money is driving the move; OI spiking while price stalls means leverage is crowding in — fuel for a cascade.
Related: Deep dive: liquidation cascades
Liquidation is the exchange force-closing your leveraged position because losses have consumed your margin. Unlike a stop-loss, you don't choose the price — and clustered liquidations chain into the cascades behind crypto's fastest crashes.
Related: Lesson 7 · liquidation cascades
A breakout is price escaping a level that repeatedly held; a retest is its return to that level, which often flips role — old resistance acting as new support. Professionals often prefer entering on the retest because a failed one exposes the false breakout early.
Related: Stage 3 — Technical analysis
A timeframe is the duration each candle represents — from one minute to one month. Higher timeframes carry more signal and less noise; most beginners lose on low timeframes where fees, spread and randomness dominate any edge.
Related: Lesson 11 — Choosing your timeframe
Expectancy is your average profit or loss per trade over a large sample: (win rate × average win) − (loss rate × average loss). A positive expectancy is the mathematical definition of an edge — and the only reason to place a trade.
Related: Risk/reward planner
Win rate is the percentage of your trades that close in profit — and alone it means nothing: a 90% win rate loses money if the tenth trade gives it all back. It only gains meaning next to risk/reward, inside the expectancy formula.
Related: Lesson 25 · expectancy
The full roadmap, the position-sizing cheat sheet and the risk checklist — free.