84 terms

Dictionary: N

NAIRU (natural rate of unemployment): The unemployment rate consistent with stable inflation; below it, wage and price pressure is supposed to build, above it, inflation should ease.
Naive diversification: Splitting capital equally across every available option without modelling correlations, expected returns or volatility. Often called the 1/N rule.
Naked call: A short call with no long stock or long call behind it; theoretically unlimited loss and the highest option approval level.
Naked option requirement: The margin formula for a short option with no offsetting position, typically a percentage of underlying value less the out-of-the-money amount.
Naked point of control: A prior session's point of control that price has not revisited since, watched as a potential magnet on a future day.
Naked put: A short put without the cash set aside to buy the shares; the same position as a cash-secured put but financed with margin.
Naked short selling: Selling shares short without having borrowed them or arranged a locate, so there may be no shares to deliver at settlement.
Name service (ENS-style): A human-readable name that resolves to a crypto address, replacing a long hex string with something you can read and remember.
Nano lot: A position of 100 units of the base currency, one tenth of a micro lot, offered by a few brokers so small accounts can size risk properly.
Narrative fallacy: The pull toward a clean causal story for random price movement, which makes noise feel like information.
Narrow framing: Judging each trade in isolation instead of as one draw from a long sequence, which makes normal losses feel like catastrophes.
Narrow range bar: A bar whose high-to-low range is the smallest of the last several bars, often preceding a volatility expansion.
National best bid and offer (NBBO): The highest bid and lowest offer available across all US protected equity venues at a moment in time, forming the reference price the whole market is measured against.
Natural gas futures (NG): NYMEX contracts on 10,000 MMBtu of natural gas delivered at Henry Hub, Louisiana, with a $0.001 tick worth $10 and famously violent price behaviour.
Natural gas storage report: The EIA's weekly estimate of working gas in underground storage, released Thursdays at 10:30 New York time and the dominant scheduled driver of gas futures.
Natural price: The price at which an order fills immediately — the ask if you are buying, the bid if you are selling, or the sum of those on a spread.
NBER recession dating: The process by which the National Bureau of Economic Research's committee sets the official peak and trough months of US business cycles, typically announced six to eighteen months late.
Near-miss effect: An almost-win drives the same urge to continue as a win, which is why being stopped out by a tick feels like a reason to re-enter.
Neckline: The confirmation level of a head and shoulders, double top or double bottom, drawn through the swing points between the peaks or troughs.
Negative balance protection: A policy or rule under which a retail client cannot lose more than the money in their account, with any deficit after a violent gap written off by the broker.
Negative convexity: When a bond's price gains less on a rally than it loses on a selloff, caused by an option the issuer or borrower holds against you.
Negative interest rates: A policy rate set below zero, so banks pay to hold reserves at the central bank; used by the ECB, the SNB, the BoJ and others to push cash into lending and risk assets.
Negative oil settlement, April 2020: On 20 April 2020 the expiring May WTI contract settled at minus $37.63 a barrel, the first negative settlement in a major futures market, because storage at Cushing had effectively run out.
Net asset value: A fund's assets minus its liabilities, divided by shares outstanding: the per-share value of what the fund actually owns.
Net asset value: A fund's assets minus its liabilities, divided by shares outstanding. It is the accounting value of one share and the price at which open-end funds transact.
Net capital rule (Rule 15c3-1): The SEC rule setting minimum liquid capital a broker-dealer must hold at all times, with illiquid assets excluded and risky positions given a haircut.
Net credit: A multi-leg trade where you take in more than you pay out; cash arrives up front and the risk is what can still be lost beyond it.
Net debit: A multi-leg trade where you pay out more than you take in; cash leaves the account and the debit is usually the maximum loss.
Net debt: Total debt minus cash and liquid investments; what the company would still owe if it used every spare dollar to pay lenders tomorrow.
Net debt to EBITDA: Net debt divided by EBITDA, expressed in turns; roughly how many years of cash earnings it would take to repay the borrowings.
Net exposure: Long position value minus short position value, expressing your directional bet on the market as a whole.
Net income: What is left after every expense, interest and tax: the bottom line of the income statement and the numerator of EPS.
Net interest margin: A bank's interest income less interest paid, divided by average earning assets; the core profitability measure of lending.
Net margin: Net income as a percentage of revenue; what is left for shareholders after every cost, including interest and tax.
Net revenue retention: Revenue from last year's customers this year, divided by what they paid last year, including upgrades, downgrades and cancellations but not new customers.
Netting: Combining multiple obligations between two parties into a single net amount, reducing both settlement flows and the exposure at risk if one side defaults.
Neural network: A flexible model of stacked weighted transformations. Extremely capable given abundant data with strong signal, which is the opposite of most trading datasets.
Neutral rate (r-star): The policy rate that neither stimulates nor restrains the economy once inflation is at target; unobservable, estimated, and the anchor for the long end of the curve.
New highs minus new lows: The count of stocks making 52 week highs minus those making 52 week lows, a direct measure of where the extremes of a market are.
New York session: The US trading hours, roughly 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern, where most US economic data and equity-driven flows hit forex.
News anxiety: Continuous consumption of market news raising baseline stress and creating a feeling of obligation to react to each headline.
News trading rule: A prop-firm restriction on holding or opening positions within a window around major economic releases.
Next-bar execution: The convention that a signal computed on a bar can only be filled on the following bar, usually at its open. The safe default for bar-based backtests.
NFA (National Futures Association): The self-regulatory organization for the US futures and retail forex industry, operating under CFTC oversight.
NFA Compliance Rule 2-43(b): The US rule that bans holding offsetting long and short positions in the same currency pair in one account and requires offsetting orders to be applied first in, first out.
NFA membership: Required membership of the National Futures Association for US futures brokers, advisers and pool operators, with its own rulebook, audits and arbitration forum.
NFP (Non-Farm Payrolls): The monthly US jobs report, released the first Friday of the month at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, showing jobs added, unemployment, and wages.
NFT: A token representing a unique item rather than an interchangeable unit, traded individually and priced by collection floor plus traits.
NFT royalties: A percentage of each secondary sale directed to the original creator, enforced by marketplace policy rather than by the chain itself.
NGMI: Not going to make it - used to dismiss someone whose behaviour or conviction is judged inadequate, often for selling.
Ninja: Desk slang for USD/JPY, one of several nicknames for the dollar-yen pair.
Nixon shock: The August 1971 suspension of the dollar's convertibility into gold, which ended the Bretton Woods system and led within two years to the floating rates traded today.
No dealing desk (NDD): A marketing term for brokers that claim to route all client orders to external liquidity rather than taking the other side themselves.
No-action letter: A written SEC staff statement that it would not recommend enforcement if a described transaction proceeds as outlined; persuasive guidance, not a change in the law.
No-arbitrage principle: The rule that two packages with identical payoffs must cost the same; the foundation under every option pricing relationship.
No-load fund: A fund sold without a sales commission at purchase or redemption, so the whole investment goes to work immediately.
Node: A computer that keeps a full copy of a chain and independently checks every block against the rules.
Nominal yield: A yield quoted in plain currency terms, with no adjustment for inflation; what ordinary Treasuries and corporate bonds pay.
Non-cash charges: Expenses that reduce reported profit without any money leaving the business, added back at the top of the cash flow statement.
Non-commercial trader: The COT category for large reportable participants with no physical business in the commodity — the legacy report's label for speculators.
Non-controlling interest: The share of a consolidated subsidiary that the parent does not own, carved out of both profit and equity so the parent's numbers are not overstated.
Non-current assets: Assets the company expects to hold longer than a year: property and equipment, goodwill, other intangibles, long-term investments and right-of-use lease assets.
Non-custodial wallet: A wallet where you alone hold the private keys, so no company can freeze, lend or lose your funds, and none can recover them either.
Non-deliverable forward (NDF): A cash-settled forward on a restricted currency: no local currency changes hands, only the difference between the agreed rate and an official fixing, paid in dollars.
Non-GAAP measures: Company-defined profit figures that exclude items management considers unrepresentative, always presented alongside a required reconciliation to audited results.
Non-professional status: A market data classification for individuals trading their own money, granting heavily discounted data fees provided they meet strict eligibility conditions.
Non-reportable positions: The residual in the COT report: everyone whose position is too small to trigger reporting, obtained by subtracting reported positions from total open interest.
Non-traded REIT: A REIT sold directly to investors rather than listed on an exchange, valued periodically by appraisal and offering only limited, capped redemption.
Nonce: A counter attached to transactions from an address that fixes their order, or in mining, the number varied to search for a valid hash.
Normal (upward-sloping) yield curve: A curve where longer maturities yield more than shorter ones, the usual shape in an expanding economy with stable policy.
Normal distribution: The symmetric bell-shaped distribution assumed by most textbook finance. Market returns resemble it in the middle and not at all in the tails.
Normalisation: Putting features on a comparable scale, usually by subtracting a mean and dividing by a standard deviation, so no input dominates simply because its units are larger.
Not-held order: An order that gives the broker's trader discretion over price and timing, with no obligation to fill at any particular print.
Notional exposure: The full market value of the currency you control, as opposed to the margin posted for it; the number that determines how much you actually make or lose per pip.
Notional leverage: The ratio of a futures position's full contract value to the account equity backing it — the honest measure of how levered a futures trader really is.
Notional sizing: Choosing a position by the face value it controls rather than by the loss it can cause.
Notional value: The full market value of what a position controls, regardless of how much cash was put up to hold it.
Novation: The legal substitution of the clearing house as counterparty to both sides of a matched futures trade.
Nowcasting: Estimating the current quarter's growth in real time by feeding each incoming monthly data point into a model, rather than waiting for the official release weeks later.
NQ (E-mini Nasdaq-100): The CME E-mini Nasdaq-100 futures contract, worth $20 times the index; faster and more volatile than ES.
NSCC: The DTCC subsidiary that acts as central counterparty for US equity trades, guaranteeing settlement and netting members' obligations down to a single figure per security.
Null hypothesis: The boring explanation a test tries to rule out: that your strategy has no edge and the results you saw are what luck produces.
NUPL: The share of total market value that is unrealised profit, used to describe how much paper gain the market is sitting on.
NYSE TICK: A real-time count of how many NYSE stocks last traded on an uptick minus those on a downtick, used to gauge intraday urgency.

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