Glossary

Accumulating funds reinvest dividends automatically inside the fund. Distributing funds pay them out to you in cash.

An asset allocation strategy built to hold up across four economic environments (combinations of rising/falling growth and inflation) rather than betting on just one.

The total dollar value of everything a fund holds. Larger AUM usually means tighter spreads and lower risk of the fund closing.

A moving average wrapped in a volatility-based envelope (default: 20-period SMA ± 2 standard deviations) — the bands widen and narrow with how much price is actually moving.

A sharp rally (the pole) followed by a brief, mild pullback or sideways drift (the flag) — often resolves in a continuation higher.

A contract giving the right, not the obligation, to buy a stock at a fixed price before a set expiration date — typically bought when expecting the stock to rise.

One trading period's open/high/low/close, drawn as a body (open-close range) with wicks (the high/low extremes beyond it) — the basic unit every chart is built from.

The average of individual analysts' published forecasts for a number — the bar an actual reported result gets compared against to call it a "beat" or "miss."

Selling a call option against stock you already own, collecting the premium as income in exchange for capping your upside above the strike price.

Uses derivatives to cancel out FX swings between the fund's currency and its holdings' currencies — costs a bit more, removes a risk you may not want.

A valuation method that estimates all of a business's future cash flows and converts them into a single value in today's dollars.

Total debt divided by shareholder equity — how much of the company is financed by borrowing versus its own capital.

Two roughly equal peaks separated by a pullback — a failure to make a new high on the second attempt, often a bearish reversal signal.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — a rough proxy for operating cash generation, ignoring financing and accounting choices.

A moving average that weights recent prices more heavily than older ones, so it reacts faster to new trends than a simple average.

Management's own forecast for next quarter or the full year — raised, reaffirmed, lowered, or withdrawn, and often moves the stock more than the quarter that already happened.

A three-peak reversal pattern — a higher middle peak (the head) flanked by two lower, roughly equal peaks (the shoulders).

Moving Average Convergence Divergence — a momentum indicator built from two EMAs; crossovers between its two lines flag shifting momentum.

Earnings with items management considers one-time or non-core excluded — not a regulated definition, so it's worth checking what's actually being left out.

Price-to-Earnings — how many dollars investors are paying for each dollar of the company's annual profit. Lower generally means cheaper.

A trend-following indicator plotting dots that flip sides of the price when a trend potentially reverses — designed as a trailing-stop suggestion, not a standalone signal.

P/E divided by expected earnings growth rate — a P/E-like multiple that adjusts for how fast the company is actually growing.

Physical funds actually buy the underlying securities. Synthetic funds use a swap with a bank to deliver the index's return instead.

Support and resistance levels calculated directly from the prior period's high, low, and close — the same formula gives every trader identical levels.

A contract giving the right, not the obligation, to sell a stock at a fixed price before a set expiration date — typically bought when expecting the stock to fall.

Net income divided by shareholder equity — how efficiently a company turns the money shareholders have put in into profit.

Relative Strength Index — momentum oscillator from 0-100. Above 70 is commonly read as overbought, below 30 as oversold.

The percentage of a stock's available float currently sold short — a direct read on how much the market is betting against it, and the fuel a short squeeze needs.

Borrowing shares and selling them immediately, betting the price falls so they can be bought back cheaper later — the opposite of a normal long position, with theoretically unlimited risk.

The fixed price at which an option's holder can buy (a call) or sell (a put) the underlying stock, regardless of where the stock is actually trading.

The fund's annual running cost, as a % of your investment, taken out of the fund automatically — not billed to you separately.

Calculated values measuring how sensitive an option's price is to a stock move (Delta), the passage of time (Theta), and changing volatility expectations (Vega).

The actual gap between a fund's return and its benchmark's return over a period — the real-world cost of holding it, beyond just the TER.

The average price a security has traded at, weighted by how much volume happened at each price — roughly what the average trader actually paid.