A plain-English guide to the words you will meet on the board — from ask and bid to swap and yield.
Ask — The price at which you can buy an instrument.
Base currency — The first currency in a pair — e.g. EUR in EUR/USD.
Bear market — A market in a sustained downtrend.
Bid — The price at which you can sell an instrument.
Bull market — A market in a sustained uptrend.
CFD — Contract for Difference — an agreement to exchange the price difference of an asset, letting you trade long or short with leverage.
Commission — A fee some accounts pay per trade, separate from the spread.
Drawdown — The drop from a peak in your account equity to a subsequent low.
Equity — Your balance plus or minus the profit/loss of open positions.
Expert Advisor — An automated strategy that runs on MetaTrader 4 (MQL4).
Leverage — Using borrowed capital to control a larger position with a smaller deposit.
Long — A buy position that profits if the price rises.
Lot — A standard unit of trade size — 100,000 units of the base currency in FX.
Margin — The deposit required to open and hold a leveraged position.
Margin call — A warning that equity is too low to support open positions.
Pip — The smallest standard price move in a currency pair.
Quote currency — The second currency in a pair — e.g. USD in EUR/USD.
Short — A sell position that profits if the price falls.
Slippage — The difference between the expected and executed price.
Spread — The gap between the bid and ask price — the main cost of a trade.
Stop-loss — An order that closes a trade at a set loss level to cap risk.
Swap — Overnight financing applied to leveraged positions held past rollover.
Take-profit — An order that closes a trade at a set profit level.
Volatility — How much and how quickly a price moves.
Yield — The return a bond pays relative to its price.
Open an account and trade what you have learned.