Trading glossary

The ADP National Employment Report: a monthly estimate of US private-sector job creation from the research institute of ADP, the payroll-processing company. It usually comes out on the Wednesday of the same week as the official nonfarm payrolls.

An AI agent is a language model wired to tools and a loop, so it can act without being asked each step. It can place trades on its own — which is exactly why it can amplify a mistake faster than you can stop it.

An LLM does not trade for you — it is an information layer. What is it genuinely good for? The line you cannot cross and the question that actually matters.

When you paste your strategy, journal or positions into a cloud AI, that data leaves your computer and lives on someone else’s servers. Here is what actually happens to it — and when to use a local model instead.

Using AI prompts for trading research involves asking specific questions or giving instructions (prompts) to large language models (LLMs) to gather, summarize, and analyze…

AI sentiment analysis in trading uses artificial intelligence, often leveraging large language models (LLMs), to process and understand the prevailing emotional tone – whether…

Algorithmic trading utilizes predefined rules to automatically execute trades based on specific market conditions, while AI trading bots leverage machine learning and large…

A legitimate signal service shows a verified, third-party track record with drawdowns and never guarantees returns. A scam hides behind a black-box "proprietary AI" and cherry-picked screenshots. Here is the checklist.

The 1987 legend who shorted the New Zealand dollar with a position bigger than the country's money supply — and what it really teaches about currency strength, liquidity and leverage.

A 51-pip median day, an Asian morning busier than the London open, and a 0.89 correlation with NZD/USD. Measured on 521 days of our own price history.

The Australian dollar is the 'aussie' — plain slang, no coin story. What's interesting is that it's the market's risk barometer, tied to iron ore, China and the carry trade.

Average True Range measures how much a market typically moves — a volatility read that's one of the most practical tools for sizing positions and placing stops.

Testing a strategy against historical data before risking real money. In MetaTrader 5 the Strategy Tester runs it on real or generated ticks, and the tick model can change the result.

The BoC sets the rate behind the Canadian dollar, and it is the one major central bank whose inflation target is renewed by agreement with the government every five years.

The Bank of England sets policy for the pound — the world's oldest major central bank, and the one George Soros famously beat in 1992.

The Bank of Japan is Japan's central bank — and for decades its ultra-low rates have made the yen the market's favorite funding currency.

The two halves of a currency pair. The base currency is the first one, the one you buy or sell, always counted as one unit; the quote currency is the second, the one the price is measured in. In EUR/USD at 1.0850, one euro costs 1.0850 dollars. A lot is counted in the base currency and a pip is valued in the quote currency.

A basis point is one hundredth of a percent — the unit central banks and traders use so there is never any doubt about how big a rate move really is.

The spread is the gap between the buy and sell price — the built-in cost of every trade, and the reason a position starts slightly in the red the moment you open it.

He turned a $12,000 inheritance into $250,000 in college — then lost it all on one trade. That loss made him one of the greatest currency traders alive.

The Dow fell 22.6% in a day and it is still the record. The odd part: the market's fear gauge did not exist yet — 1987 is why it was built.

16 September 1992, the day the pound left Europe's Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) after the Bank of England failed to defend it, raising rates to 15% in a single day.

In ICT and Smart Money Concepts vocabulary, an order block that failed after a liquidity sweep: the swing that left the block first ran past the previous high or low, then price closed back through the block's swing, and the old zone is expected to work the other way round. Sources disagree on which candle marks it. On our 2021-2026 hourly data for ten forex pairs, once zone width and distance were matched, it held about as often as a mitigation block.

Brent and WTI are the two prices the whole oil market is quoted against — and the gap between them tells you what is moving global energy.

The 1944 system that pegged other currencies to the dollar and the dollar to gold at $35 an ounce, until 1971.

Two animals decide the mood of every market on earth. The reason comes down to how each one attacks — and to a very old con involving bearskins.

Traders call GBP/USD 'Cable' after the 1866 transatlantic telegraph that carried the rate between London and New York — still the market's most storied liquid pair.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) can analyze vast amounts of forex market data, news, and sentiment to identify complex patterns and generate…

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand's first rate hike in three years widened the interest-rate differential at the heart of the carry trade. Here's what a hawkish RBNZ means for the NZD — and why a rising gap, not a wide one, is the real signal.

The carry trade earns the interest-rate gap between two currencies — and the CTS gauges when that environment is supportive and when it is a trap.

Central banks are independent public institutions that manage a nation's currency, monetary policy, and overall financial system, aiming to maintain price stability, promote…

Interest rate differentials are the gravitational force of the forex market. Understanding how the Fed, ECB, and BOJ set rates — and why — is the single most important macro concept for every forex trader.

ChatGPT is a language model, not a trading system — it can't place orders, see live prices, or predict a currency's next move. Here's what it genuinely helps with, and the lines you should never let it cross.

A MetaTrader 5 operation, available only on hedging accounts, that closes two opposite positions in the same symbol against each other. Each is closed at the other's opening price, so the spread is not paid a second time.

The official count of who holds what in US currency futures. The CFTC publishes it every Friday with data from the preceding Tuesday. What does each category measure, how do you read an extreme, and how much delay does it really carry?

Two monthly surveys ask American households how they feel about the economy. One of them carries the inflation-expectations number the Federal Reserve reads most closely.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a key economic indicator that measures the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods…

The number of units of a currency, commodity or other asset in one lot of a symbol, in MetaTrader 5's own definition. On currency pairs it is 100,000 units of the base currency; our calculators use 100 ounces for a lot of gold and 5,000 for silver, but brokers can set their own, so check the symbol's specification.

Fundamental, technical and sentiment analysis answer different questions. We read one real session through all three: EUR/USD on US inflation day.

Copy trading automatically mirrors another trader's trades in your account. You keep control of your capital, but the risk — and the losses — stay yours.

Inflation measured without the most volatile prices. In the US Consumer Price Index (CPI), core leaves out food and energy, about a fifth of the basket, while other countries define it differently. Central banks watch it because a big food or energy move is not necessarily followed by another, so core tracks the trend better than headline inflation, which counts the whole basket.

Three costs, one bill, charged at three different moments. What does one standard lot of EUR/USD held overnight really cost, and which of the three takes over after night two?

Opening two positions can feel like diversifying. With correlated pairs, you have often just doubled the same bet — and the same risk. Here is how to see it.

Three questions decide whether an entry starts with a fair chance. A heatmap answers them per pair: scheduled releases, movement against normal and the crowded side.

Currency intervention is when a government or central bank buys or sells its own currency to move its price — a rare, sudden force that can reverse a trend in minutes.

De-dollarization is the slow effort by some countries to trade and save in currencies other than the US dollar — and it matters because the dollar sits on one side of most forex pairs.

AI can generate convincing fake headlines, images and audio, and markets react in milliseconds — so a fake can spike a currency for minutes before it is debunked. Chasing that spike is the trap.

The dollar sits on one side of about 89% of all currency trades — even in pairs that do not include it. Why, and what does it mean for reading strength?

The dot plot is the Federal Reserve's chart of where each official expects interest rates to go — a rare peek at a central bank's own forecast, and a frequent market mover.

Drawdown represents the peak-to-trough decline in a trading account over a specific period, measuring the percentage loss from its highest equity point to its lowest before a new…

US Dollar Index, the index measuring the dollar against a basket of major currencies.

Electronic communication network. In US stock market rules, a system that shows orders to third parties and lets them trade against them. In retail forex it is a broker's label for routing orders to a network of liquidity providers, not a licence category.

In 2022 a currency lost close to a third of its value in days — not because of its economy, but because of a political decision. Here is how sanctions hit a currency, and why the effect is not always what it looks like.

A 64-pip median day, 61% of the range inside four hours, and a 0.80 correlation with GBP/USD. Measured on 521 days of our own price history.

The ECB sets monetary policy for the euro — the second most-traded currency — across 20 countries, which makes it uniquely complex and uniquely important.

In ICT and Smart Money Concepts vocabulary, a swing that tries to extend the move but falls short of the previous high or low. If price then breaks structure the other way, the order block it leaves behind is called a mitigation block; had the swing run past that extreme first, it would be a breaker block.

A Fair Value Gap (FVG) is one type of imbalance: a three-candle pattern where rapid price movement leaves an unfilled space on the chart. This gap, between the wick of…

Futures that settle on the average effective federal funds rate of their month, priced at 100 minus that rate, so they show the rate path the market expects. Tools such as CME Group’s FedWatch turn their prices into odds for each Fed meeting.

The Federal Reserve is the US central bank — and because it sets the interest rate on the world's reserve currency, its decisions move every major forex pair.

On 7 October 2016 the pound lost almost 9% against the dollar in under 40 seconds, then won most of it back. What was the 2016 pound flash crash, and why did it happen?

The advice is good and almost everything sold under that name in forex cannot be seen. Spot has no central exchange, so there is no real volume and no tape. Here is the money you can actually follow: public, free and delayed.

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is the monetary policymaking body of the U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve. Its "Rate Decision" is the highly anticipated…

Fear of missing out: entering a trade late and without a plan simply because the move already started without you.

Previous, forecast, actual — and a colored impact dot. What does each number on the economic calendar mean, and why is the 'surprise' (actual vs forecast) the one that moves price?

The Forex Strength Index (FSI) is ForexCommand's proprietary market-sentiment gauge, providing a single 0-100 score to measure the overall degree of fear or greed present in the…

Every pair is two currencies pulling against each other — the FOTSI oscillator isolates each one's momentum so you can see which side is driving the move.

In 2013 the Fed only hinted it would slow its bond buying, and the 10-year yield jumped from 1.66% to 2.98%. What was the taper tantrum, and why did the rupee lose 22%?

For six weeks EUR/CHF barely moved. What was the Frankenshock, and why did stop-losses fail to protect anyone on 15 January 2015?

Fundamental, technical and sentiment analysis answer different questions. We read one real session through all three: EUR/USD on US inflation day.

Close to close it moves 55 pips against USD/JPY's 53. The beast reputation is intraday range, not displacement. A derived series, and we say so.

An 80-pip median day and only 5% of sessions under 40. The same clock as EUR/USD, turned up. Measured on 521 days of our own price history.

Two near-identical assets, one in a calm region and one in a tense one, trade at different prices. That gap is the geopolitical risk premium — and it moves currencies before anything happens.

On one day in 1992, a single fund bet $10 billion the pound would break — and a central bank surrendered. A clean lesson in price versus fundamentals.

A "death cross" is one of the most-quoted chart signals — and one of the most misread. Gold is giving us a textbook live example right now, so let's use it to separate the signal…

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the total monetary value of all finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a period — usually a quarter or a year.…

Hawkish monetary policy refers to a central bank's stance aimed at controlling inflation, typically by raising interest rates or tightening the money supply, while dovish policy…

The other way MetaTrader 5 counts positions, added in 2016: each deal can open a position of its own, so a buy and a sell of the same symbol can be open at once. Opening the opposite position to stop a loss from growing is called a lock; it fixes the loss without closing it.

HFT competes against other machines over microseconds, not against you. What is it really, where do you feel it as retail, and why was your edge never speed?

ICT refers to the educational material of Michael J. Huddleston ('The Inner Circle Trader'), a specific school within the broader SMC / price-action world that popularised terms…

In price-action and Smart Money Concepts analysis, a stretch of the chart that price crossed so one-sidedly that it was barely traded. It is the family name: the fair value gap, the volume imbalance and the opening gap are types of imbalance, and a liquidity void is a longer one-way run that can contain several fair value gaps.

Inducement is a smaller, obvious high or low that lures traders to enter early and place stops, creating liquidity for price to grab before moving to the true zone, often sitting…

Inflation is the rate at which prices rise and money loses value — and the single biggest driver of the central bank decisions that move every currency pair.

Institute for Supply Management, whose purchasing managers' indices measure US manufacturing and services activity.

The Economic Policy Symposium the Kansas City Fed has hosted in Wyoming since 1982 — how a farming conference became the stage where central banks trail policy shifts?, and what actually moves in forex when they do?

Every candlestick sums up the fight between buyers and sellers in one shape. Learn to read its body and wicks, and the essential patterns grouped by what they signal: indecision, reversal or continuation.

The yen keeps sliding while Tokyo warns and the BoJ holds. That isn't a contradiction — it's a rate gap, a crowded carry trade and an intervention ceiling. Here's the framework, not the day's level.

A trader on an ordinary desk built €49.9 billion in hidden positions. Unwinding them over three days cost Société Générale €4.9 billion.

He made $100 million betting the 1929 crash would come — then lost every cent. The Boy Plunger’s real lesson isn’t timing; it’s discipline and risk.

A math professor who never read a chart hired physicists instead of traders — and never let anyone overrule them. A lesson in method, not prediction.

Initial Jobless Claims (IJC) is a crucial weekly economic report that tallies the number of individuals who filed for state unemployment benefits for the first time during the…

Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, the US survey of job openings and labour turnover.

Leverage in forex allows traders to control a much larger position in the market with a relatively small amount of their own capital, essentially borrowing funds from their…

Liquidity is how easily you can trade without moving the price — the hidden force behind your spread, your slippage, and even where price is drawn.

A move that runs just past an obvious high or low, triggers the stop and breakout orders clustered there, and then turns back. What separates it from a real breakout is what happens next: after a sweep, price closes back inside; after a breakout, it keeps going.

A run of candles moving in one direction with little trading in between, which can leave two or more fair value gaps inside it. It is wider than a single fair value gap: on our hourly data the median void measured 16.2 pips, against 7.0 for fair value gaps of 3 pips or more.

The WM/Reuters 4 p.m. benchmark exchange rate, calculated since February 2015 over a five-minute window around 16:00 London time. Funds and companies ask their banks to trade at it, so orders bunch up in those minutes, above all at month-end. On ordinary days in our 2026 one-minute data for ten pairs, the fix window had 60% more ticks than a normal hour.

The Canadian dollar (CAD) is nicknamed the 'loonie' after a bird on its coin — and it trades almost in lockstep with oil, which is where the FOTSI comes in.

To calculate your position size, first determine your maximum acceptable monetary risk per trade (e.g., 1-2% of your account). Then, divide this…

Machine learning lets software learn patterns from market data instead of following rules you write by hand — powerful for analysis, but it fits the past and never understands the future.

Usually not: your broker closes your positions before the account hits zero. But closing needs a price to close at, and there’s one known case where there isn’t one.

The chart looks like itself at every scale: a daily candle is a whole trend on the 5-minute. What is market fractality, and how do you use it to read multiple timeframes?

The Market Maker Model, sometimes called the AMD cycle or the "Power of 3", is a conceptual narrative explaining how large institutional players often move price through three…

Three labels for what a broker does with your order. Which one is yours, and why does the licence say more than the account page?

Mastering forex trading requires understanding three core order types: use a market order for immediate execution at the current price, a limit order to buy below or sell above…

A profile that counts time instead of volume: how long price spent at each level, marking each period that touched a price (each mark is a TPO). It asks the same question as a volume profile with a different input.

Direction is only half the trade. Before you ask where price is going, ask whether the market is even ready to move — and learn the five factors that answer it.

Market structure, in Smart Money Concepts (SMC), maps price's directional flow via swing highs and lows: an uptrend prints higher highs and higher lows; a downtrend, lower highs…

One hedge fund returned about 66% a year for three decades — and has been closed to outsiders since 1993. What the Medallion Fund was?, and why you can't copy it?

A worked example of how geopolitics affects forex: midterm elections do not move the dollar because of who wins, but because of whether government ends up divided. The chain runs from spending to inflation, then to rates, and only then to the exchange rate.

A mitigation block is an order block that failed without a liquidity sweep: price fell short of the previous extreme, then broke structure the other way. How to spot it.

Monetary policy refers to the actions undertaken by a nation's central bank to control the money supply and credit conditions to stimulate or slow economic growth, typically by…

Survival in trading comes from how you manage risk, not from how often you predict the market correctly.

The average price over the last N bars, redrawn with each new bar to smooth price. The simple (SMA) and exponential (EMA) versions differ in how quickly they turn.

One of the two ways MetaTrader 5 counts positions: one position per symbol, so a new deal on that symbol adds to it, shrinks it, closes it or reverses it. The mode is set per account, not per trade.

17:00 New York time, where one forex trading day ends and the next begins: positions still open then roll over and swap is applied. Some MT5 brokers put their server's midnight there. On our 2026 one-minute data for ten pairs, the bid dropped a median 7.6 pips into the 17:00 bar on almost no trading, as the spread widened.

One trader, one hidden account, and a bank that had financed the Napoleonic Wars — gone. The most expensive lesson in trading isn't about being right; it's about the loss you refuse to take.

A ballroom dancer turned $25,000 into more than two million by telegram, watching only price and volume: the Darvas "box" method.

The Nikkei 225 is Japan's benchmark stock index — the 225 biggest companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and a live read on the yen that every forex trader should know.

The Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) report is a crucial monthly economic indicator released by the U.S. Department of Labor, measuring the total number of paid employees in the U.S…

The calmest of seven major pairs in pips (48 a day) and the most volatile in percent (0.81% of its price). Measured on 521 days of our own price history.

Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, the cartel that coordinates crude oil production.

An order block (OB) is the last opposing candle or candle cluster before an impulsive price move that breaks market structure, marking a specific zone where institutions likely…

The live list of resting buy and sell orders for an instrument; depth of market is that list shown as a ladder. Forex has no single, consolidated one: each broker or network sees its own providers.

Over the counter: bilateral trading outside an organised exchange, which is how spot currencies work.

A backtest that looks flawless is often overfitted — the model memorised the noise of the past instead of a real edge. Here is how to spot curve-fitting before it costs you real money.

The RSI, the stochastic and the MACD measure the strength of a move, not its direction. Learn what each one measures, the signal that actually matters (divergence), and the mistake that wrecks beginners.

In October 1987 the Dow fell 22.6% in a single day. One fund returned 62% that month — and the reason was a chart from 1929.

Personal Consumption Expenditures, the price index of personal spending and the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge.

Crude ticks up and the Canadian dollar tends to follow, almost like a reflex. It is not a coincidence — it is what makes a currency a petrocurrency. Here is the mechanism.

A pip (percentage in point) is the smallest standardized unit of price movement in a currency pair, typically the fourth decimal place (or second for JPY pairs). Calculating pip…

A tenth of a pip: the fifth decimal on most pairs and the third on yen pairs, quoted by brokers that show one digit more than the pip. In MetaTrader 5 it is the symbol's point.

The Policy Interest Rate is the primary tool a country's central bank uses to manage the economy, representing the target interest rate at which commercial banks borrow and lend…

Most traders obsess over entries and ignore the decision that controls risk: position size. How to size to volatility with the ATR method — not to hope.

Producer Price Index: it measures inflation at the factory gate, before it reaches the consumer.

Premium and discount zones divide a price range based on its 50% equilibrium, indicating whether an asset is considered expensive or cheap, respectively, by SMC traders who aim to…

Every trader talks in pips, but almost nobody knows it's an acronym — Percentage in Point. What is a pip really, why is the yen the exception, and how does it become your risk plan?

To calculate profit or loss, first determine your trade's pip value in the quote currency. Then, multiply this pip value by the number of pips gained or lost. Finally, convert…

The advertised split isn't the whole story. How does a prop firm's profit split really work, and what fine print decides how much you actually take home?

Prop firms don't fail you for trading badly — they fail you for breaking their risk rules. Here's what actually decides whether you clear the challenge: drawdown, position size and discipline.

The Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) is a monthly economic indicator built from surveys of purchasing managers in a country's manufacturing and services sectors, tracking new orders, production, inventories, supplier deliveries,…

Quantitative Easing (QE) and Tightening (QT) are monetary policy tools where central banks manipulate the money supply by buying or selling government bonds and other financial…

A raw account charges a commission; a standard one builds its cost into the spread. The cheaper one depends on the pair: the same $7 is 0.70 pips on EUR/USD and 1.10 on USD/JPY.

Reserve Bank of New Zealand, New Zealand's central bank.

The amount actually traded in a bar, in contracts or lots. Spot forex has no central exchange to record it; real forex volume is published by the BIS survey and by exchange-traded futures.

Relative Strength Index, a momentum oscillator that moves between 0 and 100 by comparing recent gains with recent losses. Readings above 70 are read as overbought and below 30 as oversold; they are alert zones, not automatic signals.

Margin is the collateral held by your broker to keep a position open, calculated by dividing the trade's notional value by your account's leverage…

A new price offered when the broker will not fill your order at the one you asked for. It only happens in some execution modes, such as Instant Execution in MetaTrader 5 (MT5).

Reserve Bank of Australia, Australia's central bank.

Retail Sales measures the total revenue generated by all retail stores in a country over a specific period, typically a month. It includes sales of goods like cars, clothes, food…

In 1983 Richard Dennis bet he could teach total beginners to trade like pros. He recruited the 'Turtles', gave them rules, and won — a lesson in systems and discipline.

To safeguard your capital and ensure long-term survival in the forex market, the 1% rule is the right default: risk no more than 1% of your account on any single trade. This disciplined…

Two labels for the market's mood. Risk-on: investors are willing to take risk, so money flows into stocks and growth-linked currencies such as the Australian and New Zealand dollars, and the yen tends to weaken. Risk-off: fear takes over, and money moves to safe havens such as the US dollar, the Swiss franc, the yen and gold. Neither is an indicator with a number; traders apply them after reading several markets at once.

The risk-reward (R:R) ratio is a crucial metric comparing your potential profit to your potential loss on any given trade. Expressed as X:1, where '1' represents your defined risk…

Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) in forex trading means leveraging these technologies as a co-pilot for advanced information processing…

The S&P 500 tracks 500 of the largest US companies and is the market’s main gauge of risk appetite — which is why forex traders watch it even though it is a stock index.

A war headline hits and the dollar jumps while your AUD/USD sinks. That reflex has a name — the flight to safe havens. Here is the mechanism, not just the news.

The market is open 24/5, but the money moves in just a few windows. The session overlaps — above all London–New York — are where spreads tighten, volume spikes, and the cleanest trends form.

The difference between the price you asked for and the price your order was filled at. A stop order can slip; a limit order cannot, but it may not fill.

Smart Money Concepts (SMC) is a discretionary price-action framework popularised online, reframing classic support/resistance as zones where large institutional 'smart money'…

Swiss National Bank, Switzerland's central bank.

The same euro trades in two places: over the counter and on an exchange. Who is on the other side, who sets the price, and why does the futures quote not match spot?

The standard block a forex trade is measured in, counted in units of the base currency. A standard lot is 100,000 units, a mini lot 10,000 and a micro lot 1,000, and MetaTrader writes them as 1.00, 0.10 and 0.01. On EUR/USD with a USD account, a pip is worth $10, $1 and $0.10 respectively; metals and other symbols use their own contract size.

Everyone remembers Soros and Black Wednesday. Few remember the strategist who actually sized the bet — and whose real lesson is about how much you risk when you're right.

A currency intervention the authorities carry out without announcing it at the time. Japan bought yen this way on 21 and 24 October 2022: the Ministry of Finance would not say whether it had acted, and its records later confirmed ¥6.35 trillion across the two days.

Your stop-loss should be strategically placed at a logical price point where your initial trading premise is invalidated, typically just beyond a key technical support or…

In MetaTrader 5, the minimum distance, in points, from the current price inside which you cannot place a stop-loss, a take-profit or a pending order. The broker sets it per symbol.

Straight-through processing: an order passed from one system to the next with no human in between. In a broker's marketing it means your trade is offset with a liquidity provider; it is not a licence category.

Around a fifth of the world's oil squeezes through one narrow strait. Threaten it, and crude spikes and currencies lurch. Here is how a choke point ripples into forex.

The Fed’s set of officials’ projections for growth, unemployment, inflation and the policy rate, published four times a year with the March, June, September and December decisions. The dot plot is its interest-rate chart.

Supply and demand zones are specific price areas on a chart where past institutional order flow created a sharp, imbalanced move, marking locations where buying or selling…

Support and resistance are the price levels where a market has repeatedly stalled or reversed — the foundation almost every other technical tool is built on.

A swap, also known as rollover interest, is the interest a forex broker charges or pays a trader for holding a position open past the daily market close (usually 5 PM New York…

The Swiss franc's nickname is the easy part. Why the world runs to this currency when the world catches fire is the part worth knowing.

In 2013 the Fed only hinted it would slow its bond buying, and the 10-year yield jumped from 1.66% to 2.98%. What was the taper tantrum, and why did the rupee lose 22%?

No, it's not the fruit. The New Zealand dollar (NZD) is called the 'kiwi' after the national bird on its coin — and it's a carry-trade star the CTS tracks.

There's no single building where forex trades — which is why the market runs 24 hours a day, five days a week, handing off around the world like a relay.

The minimum step a symbol's price can move, set by the broker in each symbol's specification. In MetaTrader 5 it can equal the point or be larger, and the tick value is what one such step is worth.

The number of price updates in a bar, which is what MetaTrader shows as volume on spot forex. It tracks activity, not the amount traded or the depth of the market.

Tokyo is the quietest FX session by average range — and the likeliest to produce the week’s most violent hour. Why does the tail risk live in the Asian window?

A country announces tariffs and the other side's currency drops the next day. Why does a tax on imports move the forex market? The mechanism is more double-edged than it looks.

The short answer: it depends. Here is what a bot does well, what it does badly, and why 90% of the ones you see on social media are a trap.

A stop-loss that follows the price in your favour and never moves back. In MetaTrader 5 it starts moving once the profit in points reaches the level you set.

The Unemployment Rate measures the percentage of the total labor force that is out of work but actively seeking a job, giving a snapshot of labor-market health and the broader…

The most uneven day in the series: a best hour worth 3.5 times the worst, and 67% of the range inside four hours. The only major with both currencies in one time zone.

The calmest of the five majors: a 53-pip median and 24% of days under 40. Its −0.83 against EUR/USD is the strongest inverse relationship in the series.

The only pair in the series with two peak hours: at 00:00 UTC it delivers 96% of its best hour. A 112-pip median, measured on 521 days of our own data.

The price band where, by convention, about 70% of a session's volume traded. Its edges are the value area high (VAH) and the value area low (VAL).

CBOE (Chicago Board Options Exchange) Volatility Index, known as the "fear gauge": it measures expected volatility on the S&P 500.

How far price moves over a period, regardless of direction. It is usually measured by the range of each bar or by the ATR.

Two consecutive candles whose bodies do not overlap while their wicks still do, leaving a band between the bodies that only the wicks traded through. It is rare on hourly forex charts, because forex trades around the clock and a candle usually opens where the previous one closed: on our 2021-2026 hourly data, 96% of candles opened less than one pip from the previous close.

A chart of how much volume traded at each price level, rather than over time. Wide areas mark prices the market accepted; thin ones, prices it rejected.

A new Fed chair, a hawkish first meeting and a dollar at multi-month highs: why are markets now pricing rate hikes, not cuts, and what does it mean for every FX trade?

For years the yen carry trade pays like clockwork — then wipes out months of gains in days. The story behind forex's darkest nickname, and the risk lesson inside it.

A $2.73 median day, almost twice gold as a percentage, and a "normal" that is still falling. Measured on 130 days of our own price history.

A $91 median day, 56% of the range in the London–New York overlap and a second peak in Asia. Measured on 130 days of our own price history.

The yield curve is a graph plotting the interest rates, or yields, of government bonds against their different maturities, from short-term to long-term, while real yields are…