Trading glossary

The best unrealized profit a trade reached before you closed it — and what the gap to realized P&L tells you about exits.

The worst unrealized loss a trade survived — and what your MAE distribution says about whether stops are doing real work.

What did the market do after you closed? MCE measures the move you missed — and reveals whether your exit was on time or premature.

Three numbers describe every closed trade: the best it got, the worst it threatened, and what it did after you exited. Together they tell you whether your exit was structural or lucky.

An R-multiple expresses a trade result as profit or loss measured in units of the initial risk you put at stake when you entered.

Realized P&L is profit booked when you close a position; unrealized P&L is the open, mark-to-market gain or loss on positions still running.

The minimum percentage of trades you need to win to break even at a given reward-to-risk ratio, before costs.

Expectancy is the average profit or loss you can expect per trade, measured across a large sample of trades rather than any single outcome.

Profit factor is your gross profit divided by your gross loss — the total dollars your winners made against the total dollars your losers cost.

Win rate is the share of your closed trades that finished in profit, expressed as a percentage.

The payoff ratio: your mean profit per winning trade divided by your mean loss per losing trade, measuring how much winners outsize losers.

The Sharpe ratio measures risk-adjusted return: your average excess return over the risk-free rate divided by the volatility of your returns.

Position sizing is deciding how much to trade so each position risks a controlled, predetermined slice of your account.

The Kelly criterion is the fraction of capital to bet on each trade that maximizes the long-run geometric growth rate of your account.

The portfolio-level survival metric: the probability your account hits a defined drawdown threshold before your edge has time to play out.

Maximum drawdown is the largest peak-to-trough decline in account equity over a period, measured in currency or percent.

Drawdown recovery is the percentage gain needed to climb back to a prior equity peak after a loss — and it grows faster than the loss itself.

A pip is the standard smallest price increment quoted in a forex pair, usually the fourth decimal place (0.0001), or the second (0.01) for JPY pairs.

Lot size is the standardized quantity of an instrument you buy or sell per trade unit — the block your broker measures every position in.

Margin is the capital your broker requires you to post as collateral to open and hold a leveraged position.

Leverage lets you control a position larger than your deposited capital using broker margin, expressed as a ratio such as 30:1.

Two words carry most of the meaning in central-bank commentary. Hawkish leans toward tighter money; dovish leans toward easier money. The nuance, and the mistakes, come from what they are measured against.

A rate decision is rarely the news. The news is what changed since the last one: the guidance, the votes, the projections, the balance sheet. This is how to read a policy statement the way desks do, by comparison.