Learning centre
Financial glossary
Plain-English definitions of every term you will meet in MarketLens.
- ATR (Average True Range)
- The average size of a session's price movement including gaps, over 14 sessions. Higher ATR means larger typical moves.
- Backtesting
- Testing a model on past data as if it had been used at the time, to measure how wrong it would have been.
- Bollinger Bands
- A 20-session moving average with bands two standard deviations above and below. Prices near the bands are relatively stretched.
- Candlestick
- A chart symbol showing a session's open, high, low and close. The body spans open to close; the wicks show the extremes.
- Close
- The final traded price of a session.
- Directional accuracy
- The share of forecasts whose predicted direction (up or down) matched what actually happened.
- Doji
- A candle whose open and close are almost equal, suggesting indecision.
- Drift
- The average rate at which a price has tended to rise or fall over a period.
- EMA (Exponential Moving Average)
- A moving average that gives more weight to recent prices.
- Engulfing pattern
- A candle whose body completely covers the previous candle's body in the opposite direction.
- Ensemble
- A combination of several models, each weighted by how accurate it has been.
- Exponential smoothing
- A forecasting method that averages past values with exponentially decreasing weights.
- Forecast horizon
- How far ahead a forecast looks, counted in trading sessions.
- Gap
- The difference between a session's open and the previous session's close.
- High
- The highest traded price of a session.
- Historical volatility
- How much daily returns vary, expressed as an annualised standard deviation.
- Low
- The lowest traded price of a session.
- MACD
- The difference between the 12- and 26-session EMAs, with a 9-session signal line. Used to gauge momentum shifts.
- MAE (Mean Absolute Error)
- The average absolute size of forecast errors, in price units.
- Mean reversion
- The tendency of a price to move back toward its average after moving away.
- Momentum
- The rate of recent price change, here measured as the percentage change over 20 sessions.
- OHLC
- Open, High, Low and Close — the four prices that summarise a session.
- Open
- The first traded price of a session.
- Quote currency
- The currency an instrument is priced in, e.g. INR for NSE stocks or USD for BTC-USD.
- Random walk
- A baseline model that assumes the next price equals the current price. Good models should beat it.
- Resistance
- A price level where rising prices have previously stalled.
- RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error)
- An error measure that penalises large misses more heavily than MAE.
- RSI (Relative Strength Index)
- A 0–100 momentum gauge comparing recent gains with losses. Above 70 is often called overbought; below 30 oversold.
- Scenario (Buy / Sell / Neutral)
- A label MarketLens assigns using transparent rules on projected move, trend and uncertainty. Not a recommendation.
- SMA (Simple Moving Average)
- The plain average of the last n closing prices.
- Stale data
- Data that is older than expected because the source has not updated or could not be reached.
- Support
- A price level where falling prices have previously stopped.
- Trading session
- A day on which the market is open for trading.
- Uncertainty range
- The band around a forecast within which roughly 80% of past forecast errors fell. Not a guarantee.
- Volume
- The number of units traded in a session.
- Walk-forward testing
- Backtesting that moves forward through time so each forecast only uses data available at that moment.
Go deeper in our Market Insights articles.