54 terms

Dictionary: W

WAGMI: We are all going to make it - a solidarity slogan in speculative communities, used sincerely and ironically.
Walk-forward analysis: Repeatedly fit parameters on a block of history, trade the block immediately after it, then roll both windows forward and stitch the untouched results together.
Wallet: Software or hardware that holds the private keys controlling your crypto; self-custody means you, not an exchange, control the funds.
Wallet drainer: Malicious code, usually behind a fake site or airdrop, that tricks you into signing a transaction or approval that empties your wallet.
Warehouse receipt: The transferable title document that changes hands in a commodity futures delivery, representing goods stored at an approved facility.
Warrant: A company-issued long-dated right to buy new shares at a set price; exercise creates new stock and dilutes existing holders.
WASDE report: The USDA's monthly balance sheet for major crops, published around midday on the 9th to 12th, and the single largest scheduled event in agricultural futures.
Wash sale 61-day window: The wash sale period runs 30 days before through 30 days after a loss sale, 61 days including the sale day; a replacement purchase in that window defers the loss. United States.
Wash sale rule: A US tax rule that disallows a loss on a security if you buy the same or a substantially identical one within 30 days before or after the sale.
Wash trade: A trade in which the same beneficial owner is on both sides, producing no real change in ownership. Prohibited on futures exchanges even when accidental.
Wash trading: Trading with yourself to manufacture volume or price history, common on unregulated venues and in NFT markets where fees are low or rebated.
Wash trading: Illegally trading with yourself, or with a colluding party, to generate volume or prints without any real change in beneficial ownership.
Wave extension: In Elliott Wave, when one impulse wave stretches far beyond the others and subdivides into its own five-wave sequence.
Weak hands: Holders who sell easily under pressure, usually because they are oversized, late, or without a thesis.
Weekend gap: The difference between Friday's closing price and the following Sunday or Monday opening price, created because news continues over a weekend while the market is shut.
Weekend gap anxiety: Distress from holding positions over a period when you cannot act, which is often a sizing problem wearing an emotional costume.
Weekend risk: The gap risk specific to holding through a non-trading period, when news accumulates for 48 hours or more with no way to react.
Weekly loss limit: A second-tier drawdown cap covering a run of ordinary days, which catches the slow bleed a daily limit never triggers on.
Weekly open: The opening price of the trading week, used as a simple reference for whether participants are net better or worse off so far.
Weekly options: Short-dated contracts listed to expire on a specific weekday, giving fine control over event timing at the cost of brutal time decay.
Weighted average cost of capital: The blended after-tax cost of a company's debt and equity, weighted by how much of each it uses; the standard discount rate for enterprise valuation.
Weighted average shares: The average share count over the reporting period, weighted by how long each share existed; the denominator used for earnings per share.
Weighted moving average: A moving average that assigns linearly decreasing weights to older bars, sitting between a simple and an exponential average in responsiveness.
Weighted vega: Vega adjusted for the fact that short-dated implied volatility moves more than long-dated, so that vega across expirations can be summed honestly.
Whale: An individual or entity holding enough of an asset that their trades move the market.
Whale wallet: An address holding enough of an asset to move its price. Tracked publicly, and far harder to interpret than the alerts suggest.
Wheat futures (ZW): CBOT contracts on 5,000 bushels of soft red winter wheat, the most internationally sensitive of the US grain contracts.
When-issued trading (WI): Forward trading in a Treasury security between the announcement of an auction and its settlement, which produces the price benchmark used to judge the auction result.
Whipsaw: A quick move in one direction followed by an equally quick reversal, catching traders on both sides.
Whisper number: The unpublished expectation investors actually hold, usually above published consensus, against which the share price reaction is really measured.
White knight: A friendly acquirer invited by a target's board to outbid a hostile bidder on terms the board prefers.
White label broker: A brokerage that operates under its own brand using another firm's technology, liquidity and sometimes its regulatory permissions.
Wholesaler: A large market-making firm that buys retail order flow from brokers and executes it internally, profiting from the spread it captures.
Wick (shadow): The thin line above or below a candle body showing how far price traveled beyond the open and close.
Wide range bar: A bar whose range is far larger than recent bars, marking a burst of volatility that often defines a level worth watching.
Widow-maker spread: The March versus April natural gas spread, which prices the risk that winter ends with storage empty. Famous for enormous, fast losses.
Williams %R: An oscillator measuring where the close sits relative to the highest high of the lookback period, plotted on an inverted scale from 0 to -100.
Win rate: The percentage of trades that close with a profit; meaningless on its own without average win and loss size.
Win rate confidence interval: The range your true win rate plausibly falls in given your sample, which is embarrassingly wide until you have hundreds of trades.
Window dressing: Portfolio managers buying recent winners and selling losers near reporting dates so that holdings look better in the statement.
Winsorising: Replacing extreme values with a chosen percentile rather than deleting them, so a few wild observations cannot dominate an estimate.
Withdrawal freeze: A venue suspending withdrawals, whether for a technical reason, a network problem, or because it no longer has the assets to honour them.
Withholding tax and Form W-8BEN: United States: a non-resident certifies foreign status and claims treaty benefits on Form W-8BEN, typically reducing US dividend withholding from 30% to a treaty rate.
Withholding tax drag: The permanent loss of return caused by foreign tax withheld on dividends and interest that cannot be reclaimed or credited by the fund or its investors.
Working capital: Current assets minus current liabilities; the money tied up in running the business day to day, before any borrowing.
Working order: An order that has been accepted by a venue or broker and is still eligible to trade, whether displayed, hidden, held on a server or waiting on a trigger.
Worst-case loss: The honest maximum a position can cost you, assuming the stop fails, the market gaps, and liquidity disappears at the same time.
Wrap fee: A single annual percentage covering advice, custody, trading and reporting, charged by a platform or adviser on top of whatever the underlying funds cost.
Wrapped token: A token on one chain that represents an asset held elsewhere, redeemable one-for-one if the custodian or contract stays honest.
Written supervisory procedures: A firm's documented rules for how each regulatory obligation is met, who performs each review, and how exceptions are escalated and evidenced.
Wrong-way risk: Exposure to a counterparty that increases exactly as that counterparty's own creditworthiness deteriorates, so the protection is weakest when it is most needed.
Wyckoff accumulation schematic: A labelled sequence describing how a base forms: a selling climax, an automatic rally, secondary tests, a spring, and finally a sign of strength.
Wyckoff distribution schematic: The topping counterpart to accumulation: a buying climax, automatic reaction, upthrusts above the range, and a final sign of weakness.
Wyckoff method: An approach built on reading the relationship between price, volume and time to infer whether large operators are accumulating or distributing.

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