154 terms

Dictionary: T

T+1 settlement: US stock trades settle one business day after the trade date; before May 2024 it was two days.
T1 halt: A regulatory trading halt code meaning news is pending or being disseminated, giving the market time to absorb a material announcement before trading resumes.
T12 halt: A halt code indicating the exchange has requested additional information from the company, often used when disclosure is questionable or a promotion is suspected.
Tactical asset allocation: Deliberate short-to-medium term deviations from the strategic weights, based on a view about valuation, momentum or the macro cycle.
Tail hedge: A position that pays off only in an extreme move, bought as insurance and expected to lose money most of the time.
Tail risk: The risk of rare, extreme moves that sit far outside normal daily ranges and can cause losses larger than any model expected.
Take rate: The share of transaction value a platform keeps as its own revenue, calculated as revenue divided by gross merchandise value.
Take-profit: A resting order that closes a winning trade at a predefined target price.
Taker-maker pricing: The reversed fee model in which the venue pays the aggressor and charges the liquidity provider, used to attract aggressive flow to a venue's book.
Tangible book value: Shareholders equity less goodwill and other intangibles; what the balance sheet says is left over if only physical and financial assets are counted.
Tanking: Falling sharply and persistently.
Tape print: A single executed trade as published on the consolidated tape, showing price, size, venue and condition flags.
Tapering: Gradually reducing the pace of central bank asset purchases toward zero; still adding stimulus, just less of it each month.
Target date fund: A single fund that holds a diversified mix and automatically de-risks along a glide path toward a stated retirement year.
Tax loss harvesting: Selling positions at a loss to realise a deduction against gains or income, while maintaining similar market exposure through a permitted replacement.
Tax lot: A distinct parcel of shares with its own purchase date and cost, and the unit you choose between when deciding which shares to sell.
Tax-advantaged account: An account with preferential tax treatment, typically deferring tax on growth or exempting it entirely, usually in exchange for contribution limits and withdrawal restrictions.
Tax-aware rebalancing: Restoring target weights while minimising realised gains, using new cash, dividends, tax-sheltered accounts and loss lots before outright sales.
Tax-loss selling: Selling losing positions to realise losses that offset gains elsewhere, concentrated near year end and capable of pushing beaten-down stocks lower into December.
Taylor rule: A simple formula that prescribes a policy rate from inflation and the output or unemployment gap; used as a benchmark for whether policy is tight or loose.
TBA market (to-be-announced): The forward market in agency MBS where trades specify issuer, coupon and settlement month but not the actual pools, which are revealed two days before settlement.
Technical analysis: Studying price and volume history on a chart to estimate the odds of what happens next, rather than valuing the underlying business.
Tender offer: A public offer to buy shares at a stated price by a deadline, either by an outside acquirer or by the company buying back stock.
Tendies: Profits. From chicken tenders, via a long-running forum joke about being rewarded for good behaviour.
Tenkan-sen: The Ichimoku fast line, the midpoint of the highest high and lowest low over the last nine periods.
Term premium: The extra yield investors demand for holding a long bond instead of rolling short ones, over and above expected future short rates.
Terminal rate: The highest policy rate the market expects in the current tightening cycle, or the lowest in an easing cycle; read off forwards rather than announced.
Terminal value: The value of all cash flows beyond the explicit forecast period, usually the majority of a DCF's total and its single largest source of error.
Terms of trade: The ratio of a country's export prices to its import prices; when it improves, the same volume of exports buys more imports and the currency usually benefits.
Terra/UST collapse: The May 2022 failure of the algorithmic stablecoin UST and its paired token LUNA, which erased roughly $40bn of market value in about a week.
Tested side: The leg of a two-sided position the underlying has moved toward; the untested side is the other one, now nearly worthless and available to roll.
Testnet: A parallel copy of a network using worthless coins, where developers and users can test without risking real money.
TFSA day-trading risk: Canada: a tax-free savings account can be reassessed as carrying on a business if traded actively, making the account's income fully taxable with the holder liable.
The wheel: A cycle of selling cash-secured puts until assigned, then selling covered calls on the shares until they are called away.
Theoretical value: What a model says an option is worth given the inputs supplied; a benchmark for judging a quote, not an authority on what the option should trade at.
Theta: The amount an option loses per day from the passage of time alone, all else equal.
Theta gang: Traders whose approach is selling options to collect time decay - the self-described opposite of buying lottos.
Three black crows: Three consecutive long red candles, each opening inside the prior body and closing near its low, showing persistent selling.
Three inside up: A bullish harami followed by a third candle that closes above the first candle's open, confirming the pause has turned into a turn.
Three outside up: A bullish engulfing candle followed by a third candle closing higher still, confirming the reversal with follow-through.
Three white soldiers: Three consecutive long green candles, each opening within the prior body and closing near its high, showing sustained buying.
Threshold securities list: The exchange-published list of stocks with persistent large delivery failures, which triggers stricter mandatory close-out rules for brokers.
Threshold security: A stock flagged for persistent settlement failures, triggering stricter close-out requirements on brokers under Regulation SHO.
Throughput (TPS): Transactions per second a chain can process; a headline number that is easy to quote and easy to mislead with.
Tick: The minimum price increment an asset can move; also one individual price change.
Tick chart: A chart where each bar contains a fixed number of transactions rather than a fixed amount of time.
Tick data: The record of individual trades, and sometimes quotes, at full time resolution. The most complete and most demanding form of market data.
Tick size: The smallest price increment a futures contract can trade in, set by the exchange rather than by the market.
Tick size regime: The rule set governing minimum price increments across a market, including tiered schemes where increments vary with price or liquidity.
Tick value: The dollar amount gained or lost per contract for one minimum price movement in a futures product.
Ticker symbol: The short letter code identifying a security on an exchange. It is a display label, not a permanent identifier, and it can be reassigned to a different company.
Tier 1 bank: One of the large global banks that make markets in size across all major currencies and sit at the centre of FX liquidity.
Tier 1 capital: A bank's highest-quality loss-absorbing capital, mainly common equity and retained earnings, measured against risk-weighted assets.
Tilt: An emotional state, usually after a loss, in which a trader abandons their plan and makes impulsive, oversized, or frequent trades.
Tilt protocol: A pre-written sequence of actions to run when a trigger fires, written when calm and followed without deciding in the moment.
Tilt triggers: The specific, repeatable events that precede your rule-breaking - identified from your own records rather than guessed at.
Time and sales (the tape): A running log of every executed trade with its price, size, and time.
Time decay curve: The non-linear shape of extrinsic value loss over an option's life: slow early, accelerating in the final weeks, near-vertical in the last days.
Time stop: Exiting because the trade has not worked within a set period, regardless of whether the price stop has been touched.
Time to recovery: How long it takes to regain a prior equity peak, which grows quickly with drawdown depth because the required gain grows faster.
Time value: The part of an option's price that is not intrinsic; what a buyer pays for the chance the option gets better before expiration.
Time-weighted return: A return measure that strips out the effect of deposits and withdrawals, used to judge a manager's decisions rather than an investor's cash-flow timing.
Time-weighted versus money-weighted return: Two ways to measure performance with cash flows: one judges the strategy, the other judges what the investor actually earned.
Timeframe: The period each candle represents on a chart, from one second to one month.
Timelock: A mandatory delay between a governance decision or admin action being approved and it taking effect, giving users a window to react or exit.
Timestamp alignment: Making sure every dataset in a backtest agrees on what time it is, including timezones, daylight saving, exchange sessions, and whether a stamp is an event or an arrival time.
Tipper and tippee liability: The rule that a person who passes inside information in breach of duty for a personal benefit is liable, as is a recipient who trades knowing of that breach.
TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities): US Treasuries whose principal is adjusted with the consumer price index, so the coupon and redemption value both rise with inflation.
Token approval: Permission you grant a contract to spend your tokens; often unlimited by default and valid until you revoke it.
Token burn: Permanently removing tokens from supply by sending them to an unspendable address or destroying them in the contract.
Token generation event (TGE): The launch moment when a token is first created and distributed, whether by public sale, exchange listing or airdrop.
Token unlock: A scheduled release of previously locked tokens to team, investors or the treasury, adding tradable supply on a known date.
Tokenomics: The supply, distribution, issuance and demand design of a token; the closest thing crypto has to a capital structure.
Tom-next: A one-day FX swap that moves a position's value date forward by a day, the mechanism brokers use to keep spot positions open overnight.
Total addressable market: The full revenue opportunity if a product were sold to every possible buyer; the ceiling a growth story is measured against.
Total crypto market cap: The summed market value of all crypto assets, often quoted excluding bitcoin (TOTAL2) or bitcoin and stablecoins (TOTAL3) to isolate risk appetite.
Total debt: Every interest-bearing borrowing added together, short and long term, before subtracting any cash. The starting point for leverage analysis.
Total expense ratio: The annual running cost of a fund expressed as a percentage of assets, covering management, administration, custody and audit. It is accrued daily and taken out of net asset value.
Total return: Return including reinvested dividends, not just the price change, and the only fair way to compare a dividend payer with a company that pays nothing.
Total return swap: A contract where one party pays the entire return of an asset, including income and price change, and receives a financing rate in exchange.
Total supply: All tokens that currently exist, including locked and unvested ones, minus any that have been burned.
Total value locked (TVL): The dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol or chain. The standard size metric in DeFi, and easy to misread.
Tourist: A participant who arrives in a market during its exciting phase and leaves when it stops being fun.
Toxic convertible: A convertible security whose conversion price floats down with the share price, so a falling stock hands the holder ever more shares and drives it lower still.
Toxic flow: Order flow that consistently loses money for the liquidity provider who fills it, because it carries short-term predictive information.
TPO: The basic unit of a market profile: one letter marking that price traded during a given time bracket, stacked to form the distribution.
Track record selection: The distortion created when only surviving or flattering records are visible, which makes the observable population of traders look far better than it is.
Tracking difference: The realised gap between a fund's return and its index return over a period. Unlike tracking error it has a sign, and it is the number that determines what an index investor actually kept.
Tracking error: How far a fund's return strays from its benchmark, caused by fees, cash drag, sampling, taxes on dividends, and the cost of rebalancing trades.
Trade at settlement (TAS): An order type that locks in the day's official settlement price, or settlement plus or minus a few ticks, before that price is known.
Trade balance: Exports minus imports of goods and services; net exports enter GDP directly, so a widening deficit subtracts from measured growth.
Trade condition codes: Flags attached to each tape print describing how it happened — auction, odd lot, late report, derivatively priced, out of sequence — and whether it counts for high, low and last.
Trade copier: Software that replicates orders from one account into others, used by prop firms to mirror selected traders into live accounts and by traders to run several accounts at once.
Trade duration: How long positions are held, which drives capital efficiency, exposure to gaps, and how much of an edge you can harvest per year.
Trade frequency: How many trades a strategy produces per unit of time, which converts a per-trade edge into an annual return and a cost bill.
Trade frequency cap: A limit on how many trades you may take in a session or week, which converts a scarce resource into a deliberate one.
Trade location: How good your entry price is relative to the structure around it, measured by how close the invalidation level sits and how far the target is.
Trade order randomisation: Shuffling the sequence of your historical trades to see how differently the equity curve could have unfolded with the same trades.
Trade reporting facility (TRF): The mechanism through which off-exchange trades are reported to the public tape, usually within seconds of execution.
Trade-through: An execution at a price worse than a protected quote displayed on another venue at the same moment, which is prohibited except under listed exceptions.
Trade-weighted index: An index measuring a currency against a basket of others, weighted by trade shares, so that a move against one partner does not distort the picture.
Trader tax status: A US facts-and-circumstances classification treating trading as a business rather than investing, unlocking business expense deductions and eligibility for the 475(f) election.
Trading addiction: Compulsive trading that continues despite harm, which resembles gambling disorder more closely than it resembles a discipline problem.
Trading coach: A paid specialist who works on process, execution, and performance habits - useful when chosen on evidence, easy to choose badly.
Trading halt: A temporary pause in trading of a stock, imposed by an exchange for news, volatility, or regulatory reasons.
Trading journal: A record of every trade with the setup, reasoning, entry, exit, risk, result in R, and what you felt and did.
Trading plan: A written document defining what you trade, when, with what setups, how much risk, and what you do when things go wrong.
Trading range: A stretch of chart where price oscillates between a rough ceiling and floor without establishing a trend in either direction.
Trading system: A complete specification of entries, exits, sizing, and risk limits that can be run over data to produce a track record.
Trailing drawdown: A prop-firm loss limit that rises with your account's peak equity and never falls back, so early profits shrink your cushion for later.
Trailing price-to-earnings: Share price divided by earnings per share over the last twelve reported months; backward-looking, fully verifiable and often stale.
Trailing stop: A stop that moves with price in your favor by a fixed distance or percentage, and locks in place when price reverses.
Trailing stop-limit: A stop that follows price by a set distance and, when triggered, submits a limit order rather than a market order.
Train, validation, test split: Three separate data blocks: one to fit the model, one to choose between models, and one used once to estimate real performance.
Transaction cost modelling: Accounting for every cost of trading in the backtest: commissions, spread, slippage, market impact, borrow, financing and taxes. Usually the difference between a great strategy and a bad one.
Transaction hash (txid): The unique fingerprint of a transaction, used to look it up, prove you sent it, or chase a missing deposit.
Transfer agent: The firm a company hires to maintain its shareholder register, issue and cancel shares, pay dividends, and process corporate actions.
Travel rule: The requirement that originator and beneficiary information travel with a funds or virtual asset transfer above a threshold, so intermediaries can screen and trace it.
Treasury auction: The competitive sale through which the US Treasury issues new debt; all winning bidders pay the same stop-out yield, and the result is a live read on demand for duration.
Treasury basis trade: Long a cash Treasury note or bond and short the corresponding futures contract, earning the difference between the note's carry and the futures' implied financing.
Treasury bill (T-bill): A US government debt security maturing in one year or less, sold at a discount to face value with no coupon; the difference between price and par is the return.
Treasury bond (long bond): A US government bond with an original maturity beyond ten years, currently the 20-year and 30-year; the longest and most rate-sensitive part of the curve.
Treasury futures: Physically delivered contracts on US government notes and bonds, the main instrument for trading and hedging interest rate risk.
Treasury General Account (TGA): The US Treasury's checking account at the Federal Reserve; when it rises, bank reserves fall by the same amount, which makes it a driver of system liquidity.
Treasury note (T-note): A US government bond with an original maturity of two to ten years, paying a fixed coupon every six months; the 10-year note is the world's main rates benchmark.
Treasury stock: Shares the company bought back and now holds itself; they carry no vote, no dividend, and do not count toward shares outstanding.
Trend: The general direction of price over a chosen timeframe: up, down, or sideways.
Trend channel: A pair of parallel lines containing a trend: the trendline on one side and a line at the same angle touching the extremes on the other.
Trend following: A systematic approach that buys markets that have been rising and sells those that have been falling, sizing positions by volatility and cutting losers by rule.
Trendline: A straight line drawn along a series of rising lows or falling highs, used as a rough visual boundary of a trend.
Trendline break: Price closing decisively through a trendline, often read as the first evidence that the pace or direction of a trend has changed.
Treynor ratio: Excess return divided by beta, measuring reward per unit of market risk rather than per unit of total risk.
Triangular arbitrage: Exploiting a mismatch between a cross rate and the two dollar rates that imply it, by trading round three pairs back to the starting currency.
Trigger: The specific event that moves you from watching a setup to being in the trade, such as a break of a bar high or a close beyond a level.
TRIN: A ratio comparing the advance-decline ratio to the up-down volume ratio, where high readings indicate selling pressure and low readings buying pressure.
Triple barrier method: Labelling each observation by which of three barriers is hit first: a profit target, a stop level, or a time limit. It labels trades the way a trader experiences them.
Triple bottom: Three failed attempts at roughly the same low, completed on a close above the highs that separate them.
Triple swap Wednesday: The convention of charging or crediting three days of financing at the Wednesday rollover, because that roll carries the value date over the weekend.
Triple top: Three failed attempts at roughly the same high, completed on a close below the lows that separate them.
Triple witching: The quarterly Friday when index futures, index options and single-stock options all expire together, producing enormous closing volume.
Troy ounce: The unit precious metals are priced in: 31.1035 grams, about 10% heavier than the ordinary avoirdupois ounce used for everything else.
True range: The greatest of the current bar's high-low span, the distance from the prior close to the high, and the distance from the prior close to the low.
True Strength Index: A double-smoothed momentum oscillator that divides smoothed price change by smoothed absolute price change, producing a cleaner momentum line.
Turn of the month effect: The tendency for returns to cluster in the last few and first few trading days of a month, linked to regular retirement and payroll flows.
Turnover: How much of the portfolio is replaced over a period, usually annualised. It multiplies every per-trade cost and is the fastest way to convert an edge into fees.
TWAP algorithm: An algorithm that spreads an order evenly through a chosen window, aiming to match the time-weighted average price.
TWAP algorithm: Slicing an order evenly over a time window so the average fill approximates the time-weighted average price. Simple, predictable, and easy to detect.
TWAP oracle: A feed that reports an average price over a window rather than the latest tick, so distorting it requires holding a false price for the whole window.
Tweezer bottom: Two or more adjacent candles with almost identical lows after a decline, showing buyers defending the same price twice.
Tweezer top: Two or more adjacent candles with almost identical highs after an advance, showing price was rejected twice at the same level.
Two and twenty: The traditional hedge fund fee shorthand: a 2% annual management fee on assets plus 20% of profits, though realised averages have drifted well below both figures.
Two-way price: A quote that shows both the price at which the dealer will buy and the price at which they will sell, without asking which way you intend to trade.
Type I error: Concluding a strategy has an edge when it does not. The expensive error in trading, because you fund it.
Type II error: Discarding a strategy that really does have an edge, usually because the sample was too small to show it.

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