- Absorption Read more
- When aggressive market orders are soaked up by large resting limit orders, so heavy buying or selling fails to move price — a sign a big passive player is defending a level.
- Basis
- The gap between a derivative’s price and the underlying spot price. For a perpetual it stays small because funding tethers the two together; a widening basis signals crowded positioning.
- Bid-ask spread Read more
- The distance between the best bid and the best ask — the immediate cost of crossing the book. Tight spreads mean a liquid market; wide spreads mean a thin one.
- Buy-side liquidity Read more
- The pool of resting buy orders (and buy stops) sitting above price — the liquidity a move upward reaches for. Often clustered above obvious swing highs.
- CVD (cumulative volume delta) Read more
- The running total of aggressive buying minus aggressive selling. Rising CVD means takers are lifting offers; falling CVD means they are hitting bids — what actually executed, not just what is resting.
- CVD divergence Read more
- When cumulative volume delta and price disagree — price makes a new high but CVD does not, hinting the move is running out of real aggression.
- Delta Read more
- Net aggression: aggressive buy volume minus aggressive sell volume over a period or at a price level. Positive delta means buyers paid up; negative means sellers pressed.
- Depth of market (DOM) Read more
- The order-book ladder of resting bids and asks stacked at each price beyond the best bid and ask — how much liquidity is waiting, and where. Also called Level 2.
- Fair value gap (FVG) Read more
- A smart-money-concepts term for an imbalanced run of candles that some traders expect price to revisit. A hypothesis about where liquidity sits — not a guaranteed level.
- Footprint chart Read more
- A chart that shows the volume traded at each price inside every candle, split into market buys vs. market sells, so you can see net aggression (delta) bar by bar.
- Funding rate Read more
- A recurring payment between longs and shorts on a perpetual future that keeps its price tethered to spot. Positive funding means longs pay shorts — a gauge of crowding.
- Heatmap Read more
- A grid that encodes a value as color across many markets and moments at once, so you can compare pressure, persistence, and clustering at a glance instead of one chart at a time.
- Iceberg order Read more
- A large limit order that only displays a small slice at a time, refilling as it fills. It reveals itself as absorption that refuses to run out.
- Kyle’s lambda Read more
- A measure of price impact — how far price moves per unit of net order flow. A low lambda means a deep, resilient market; a high lambda means a fragile one.
- Layering Read more
- Placing several resting orders at different prices to create a false impression of depth, then pulling them before they trade. A form of spoofing.
- Level 2 Read more
- Equities term for the order-book ladder beyond the best bid and ask — the same thing futures and crypto traders call depth of market (DOM).
- Liquidation Read more
- The forced closure of a leveraged position when the market moves past its margin. Cascades of liquidations can amplify a move as forced selling begets more forced selling.
- Liquidity Read more
- How easily you can trade size without moving the price. Set by the spread (cost to cross) and depth (resting size near price); the biggest driver of slippage.
- Liquidity sweep (stop hunt) Read more
- A sharp move through an obvious high or low that triggers clustered stop orders, filling resting liquidity, often before price reverses.
- Market microstructure Read more
- The mechanics of how trades actually happen — the order book, order flow, and price impact beneath the chart. The layer vyx reads.
- Market profile (TPO) Read more
- A view that organizes a session by price and time using TPO letters, showing where the market spent time and found acceptance — the value area, point of control, and auction shape.
- Microprice Read more
- An imbalance-weighted estimate of fair value that leans toward the thinner side of the book, predicting the next mid-price move better than the mid itself.
- Open interest Read more
- The total number of derivative contracts currently open. Rising open interest means new positions are being added; falling means positions are being closed.
- Order block Read more
- A smart-money-concepts label for the last candle before a strong move, treated as an institutional footprint. Useful as a liquidity hypothesis, not proof of who traded.
- Order book Read more
- The live list of resting buy orders (bids) below price and sell orders (asks) above it, at every price level — the supply and demand waiting to trade.
- Order-book imbalance Read more
- A measure of how one-sided resting liquidity is — more bids than asks (buy pressure) or more asks than bids (sell pressure). The base layer of vyx’s heatmap.
- Order-flow imbalance (OFI) Read more
- The net pressure from changes at the top of the book — bids and asks being added or pulled — and one of the strongest short-horizon predictors of price moves.
- Order-flow trading Read more
- Reading displayed liquidity and executed flow together — the order book, the tape, imbalance, CVD, sweeps and absorption — to judge intent before it shows in price.
- Perpetual future (perp) Read more
- A futures contract with no expiry. A recurring funding payment keeps its price tethered to spot, so it can track an asset indefinitely, usually with leverage.
- Point of control (POC) Read more
- The single price level with the most traded volume over a profiled period — a magnet the market often returns to.
- Price impact Read more
- How far an order moves the price. Driven by liquidity: the same size barely budges a deep market but jumps a thin one. Measured by Kyle’s lambda.
- Sell-side liquidity Read more
- The pool of resting sell orders (and sell stops) sitting below price — the liquidity a move downward reaches for. Often clustered below obvious swing lows.
- Slippage Read more
- The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. It grows with order size and shrinks with liquidity — the practical cost of price impact.
- Smart money concepts (SMC) Read more
- A framework for reading where large participants are positioned, using liquidity pools, order blocks, and fair value gaps. Its strongest parts restate real microstructure.
- Spoofing Read more
- Placing large resting orders with no intent to fill them — to create a false impression of supply or demand — then pulling them before they trade. Why a wall can lie.
- Tape (time & sales) Read more
- The live stream of executed trades — each print’s price, size, and aggressor side. Reading it is reading what actually happened, trade by trade.
- Taker / aggressor Read more
- The side that crosses the spread to trade immediately against a resting order. Aggressive buyers lift the ask; aggressive sellers hit the bid. Their net is delta.
- Value area Read more
- The price band — conventionally the central 70% of volume or time — around the point of control where most trading occurred. Price inside it is considered "fair".
- Volume profile Read more
- A histogram of how much volume traded at each price over a period, revealing the point of control, value area, and low-volume gaps where price tends to move fast.