Every technical term used across these guides, written for someone who has never placed a trade. No formulas, no assumptions — just what the term means and why a trader would care.
The highest and lowest price of the past year.
The range gives instant context to a price. A stock trading near the top of its yearly range is in demand; one near the bottom has been under sustained supply. Where price sits in that range tells you far more than the raw number does.
A strength meter that says how trending the market is.
ADX does not tell you the direction, only the conviction. Low readings, roughly under 20, describe a sideways chop where breakouts tend to fail. Higher readings, roughly above 25, describe a market that is genuinely travelling in one direction. Pairing direction from a trend tool with strength from ADX filters out a lot of false starts.
Checking how an idea would have behaved in the past.
A backtest replays a rule over historical data to see how often it worked and how badly it failed. It cannot promise the future, but it does tell you whether an idea has ever worked at all, and how much drawdown you would have had to sit through to collect the result.
The mirror image of a breakout, to the downside.
Price loses a level that had been supporting it and accelerates lower. For a long-only trader a breakdown is usually an exit signal rather than an entry, and it is the reason stop-losses are placed just under support rather than at a random percentage.
Price pushing past a level that had been holding it back.
A breakout is the moment supply at a level runs out and price moves into open space above it. The quality of a breakout depends on what comes with it — volume, a strong close near the high, and a market that is not falling apart around it. Breakouts on thin volume are the most common trap for new traders.
A bar showing open, high, low and close for one period.
The thick body spans the open and close; the thin wicks show how far price travelled and was rejected. A long lower wick means sellers pushed price down and buyers took it all back — often more informative than the closing price alone.
How closely two price series move together.
Correlation runs from +1 (moving in lockstep) through 0 (unrelated) to −1 (moving in opposite directions). It is used both to find stocks behaving like a reference chart and to avoid accidentally holding five positions that are really the same bet.
The share of the day's volume that people actually kept.
Not every trade is an investment. Intraday traders buy and sell the same day, so those shares are never delivered to a demat account. Delivery percentage strips those out and shows the share of volume held overnight. High delivery on a rising day suggests genuine accumulation rather than day-trading churn.
How an option's price responds to the world around it.
Delta is how much the option moves when the underlying moves one point. Gamma is how quickly delta itself changes, which is why option moves accelerate near key levels. Theta is the daily cost of time — an option loses value simply because expiry gets closer, which is why holding options through a quiet session is expensive.
The fall from a peak to the following trough.
Drawdown measures the pain in a strategy — how far your account fell from its high point before recovering. Two strategies with the same annual return are not equivalent if one of them got there through a 15% dip and the other through a 45% one.
A running average of price that reacts faster to recent moves.
Imagine plotting the average closing price of the last 20 days and joining the dots. That line smooths out daily noise so you can see the underlying direction. An EMA does the same thing but gives more weight to the most recent days, so it turns faster than a plain average. Price above a rising EMA is the simplest definition of an uptrend; price below a falling EMA is the simplest definition of a downtrend.
Short, medium and long-term trend lines.
The number is how many sessions the average covers. EMA 20 describes the last month of trading, EMA 50 the last quarter, EMA 200 roughly the last year. When price sits above all three and they are stacked in order, short above medium above long, the stock is in a healthy trend on every timeframe at once. That stacking is what most swing traders mean by "the trend is clean".
A basket of assets that trades like a single stock.
An ETF holds an index, a sector, or a commodity such as gold, and its units trade on the exchange all day. Because you own a basket rather than one company, single-stock disasters cannot wipe you out, which makes ETFs a common first step for people learning to swing trade.
Contracts whose value is derived from an underlying asset.
Futures commit you to a price on a future date; options give the right, not the obligation, to transact at a price. Both are leveraged, meaning small deposits control large exposure — which magnifies mistakes as efficiently as it magnifies good decisions.
Today's open is far away from yesterday's close.
Gaps happen when news arrives while the market is closed, so the first trade of the day prices it in immediately. A gap up on strong volume that then holds its opening range is a sign of real demand. A gap that fills back into the previous day's range within the first hour usually signals the opposite.
Disclosed buying or selling by people who run the company.
Promoters and senior management must legally disclose their transactions in their own company's shares. These filings are public. Consistent buying by insiders is one of the few signals where the buyer genuinely knows the business better than the market does. Selling is noisier — it can simply mean a house purchase or tax planning.
Positions opened and closed inside the same session.
Intraday trading avoids overnight news risk but demands speed and discipline, because every decision has to happen while the market is moving. Costs matter more here than anywhere else — commission and spread are paid on every round trip.
How easily you can get in and out at a fair price.
A liquid stock has enough daily turnover that your order does not move the price. Illiquid names look attractive on a scanner because their percentage moves are large, but the spread between buy and sell prices quietly eats those gains, and exiting in a fall can be difficult.
The price of the most recent trade.
LTP is the number that flickers on every screen. It is the last price at which a buyer and seller agreed, not necessarily the price you will get — in an illiquid stock the next available price can be noticeably different.
A momentum tool built from two moving averages.
MACD measures the gap between a fast and a slow moving average. When the gap widens the move is accelerating; when it narrows the move is losing steam. A "crossover" is the moment that gap flips sign, which traders read as momentum changing hands from sellers to buyers or the other way round.
How many stocks are participating, not just the index.
An index can rise because five heavyweight stocks rose while three hundred fell. Breadth counts advancers against decliners to reveal whether a move is broad or narrow. Broad participation supports a trend; a narrowing market is a warning even when the headline number looks healthy.
The tendency of strong stocks to keep being strong.
Momentum is the observation that recent winners tend to keep outperforming for a while. It is the engine behind most scanners: instead of hunting for hidden value, you sort the market by what is already working and look for the cleanest way to join it.
The number of derivative contracts currently open.
Volume counts trades; open interest counts positions still live. Rising open interest with rising price means new money is backing the move. Rising open interest with falling price means new short positions are being created. Falling open interest means positions are being closed and the current move may be running out of participants.
A price zone where large orders were previously filled.
When a big buyer fills an order at a particular price, the chart leaves a signature: a tight base followed by a sharp move away. If price later returns to that zone, the same participant often defends it, because it is where their position was built. Traders mark these zones and watch for a reaction rather than guessing a level out of thin air.
A sentiment gauge from the options market.
PCR compares activity in puts against calls. High readings mean traders are heavily positioned for a fall, which at extremes often precedes a bounce, because there is nobody left to sell. It is a crowd-positioning indicator, best read at extremes rather than day to day.
Deciding how much to buy, not just what to buy.
Position size is what converts a stop-loss into a rupee amount. If you risk a fixed slice of capital per trade — many traders use 1% — then a wider stop simply means a smaller quantity. This one habit does more for long-term survival than any indicator.
Holding for weeks to months.
Positional trading rides the larger trend and accepts deeper pullbacks along the way. It requires the fewest decisions and the most patience, and it lives on daily and weekly charts rather than minute-by-minute action.
A temporary dip inside an ongoing uptrend.
Trends do not travel in a straight line. A pullback is the pause where early buyers take profit and the stock drifts back toward a moving average or a prior breakout level. Buying a pullback in a strong trend usually offers a tighter stop-loss than chasing the same stock at its highs.
How a stock is performing compared to the index.
A stock can rise 1% on a day the index rises 2% — it went up, but it lagged. Relative strength measures that comparison directly. Rising relative strength means money is choosing this stock over the broader market, which is exactly what you want in a swing position, especially when the index itself is flat or falling.
How much you stand to make versus what you risk.
If your stop is 3% away and your target is 9%, the ratio is 1:3. A trader can be wrong more often than right and still finish ahead when the ratio is favourable. Checking it before entry is the single fastest way to filter out mediocre setups.
A 0–100 speedometer for how stretched a move is.
RSI compares the size of recent gains to recent losses and squeezes the answer into a 0–100 scale. Above 70 means the stock has risen quickly and may pause; below 30 means it has fallen quickly and may bounce. The common beginner mistake is treating 70 as an automatic sell. In a strong trend a stock can stay above 70 for weeks. Use it to judge timing, not direction.
Money moving from one part of the market to another.
Capital rarely leaves the market entirely — it moves. When banks cool off and metals begin to lead, that is rotation. Spotting it early puts you in the group of stocks with a tailwind instead of fighting a sector that has just lost its sponsorship.
The large, well-informed participants — funds and institutions.
Smart money is shorthand for participants who trade size: mutual funds, insurance companies, foreign institutions, proprietary desks. They cannot buy in one click without moving the price, so they accumulate quietly over days. That footprint — steady buying, unusual delivery, price defended at the same zone repeatedly — is what smart-money tools try to detect.
The advancing phase of a stock's life cycle.
The four-stage model popularised by Stan Weinstein describes a stock as basing (Stage 1), advancing (Stage 2), topping (Stage 3), then declining (Stage 4). Stage 2 is where sustained trends live: price above a rising long-term average, higher highs, and volume expanding on up days. Buying in Stage 2 keeps you aligned with the phase where most of the gains happen.
The price at which you accept the idea was wrong.
A stop-loss is decided before entry, not after. Its job is not to be right, it is to keep any single loss small enough that the next twenty trades still matter. Placing it under a structural level — a support zone, the low of the breakout candle — is more useful than a round percentage.
The price an option contract is written around.
Every option is tied to a strike. Where traders concentrate their positions creates practical floors and ceilings for the index, because the sellers of those contracts defend those levels. That is why the strikes with the largest build-up are watched as intraday support and resistance.
Price levels where buyers or sellers repeatedly show up.
Support is a level where falling prices have previously found buyers; resistance is where rising prices have previously found sellers. They are not exact lines, they are areas. Their value is practical: they give you an objective place to put a stop-loss and a realistic first target.
Levels implied by where option positions are stacked.
When a large number of contracts are open at one strike, the participants who sold them have a strong incentive to keep the index from settling beyond that point. The result is that heavily loaded strikes often behave like magnets and barriers during the session.
Holding for a few days to a few weeks.
Swing trading targets one leg of a move rather than every wiggle. Decisions are made after market hours, positions are held overnight, and stops are wider than intraday. For anyone with a job, it is usually the most practical style.
Trading in the direction the market is already going.
Rather than predicting turns, trend following waits for direction to establish itself and then joins it. Entries are less exciting and often feel late, but the approach avoids the most expensive habit in trading: repeatedly buying something because it looks cheap while it continues to fall.
How many shares changed hands.
Volume is the fuel behind a price move. A 4% rise on ordinary volume is one person's opinion; a 4% rise on three times the usual volume means many participants agreed at once. Volume does not predict direction on its own, but it separates moves worth acting on from moves that fade by lunchtime.
A sudden burst of trading far above the recent norm.
A spike says something changed — news, a large buyer, or a technical level breaking. Spikes at the start of a move are usually the beginning of participation. Spikes after a long run, especially with little price progress, often mark the opposite: the crowd arriving late while earlier buyers exit.
The average price everyone actually paid today.
VWAP averages every trade of the day but weights each one by how many shares changed hands. It answers a simple question: is the current price above or below what the average buyer paid today? Above VWAP, buyers who entered earlier are in profit and tend to defend the level. Below it, they are underwater and tend to sell into strength. Intraday traders use it as the day's fair-value line.
A short, curated list of stocks you are actually tracking.
A scanner produces candidates; a watchlist is what you commit to watching tomorrow morning. Keeping it short is the point. Most traders can meaningfully follow five to fifteen names, and a bloated watchlist quietly turns into no watchlist at all.
Each guide below shows the concepts above being used on a live screen.
A live board of the stocks moving hardest right now, with the sector and sentiment context that tells you whether the move is worth trading.
A live scanner that watches yesterday's high, low and close on every stock and tells you the moment today's price breaks one of them.
A live board of futures and options stocks that are moving, paired with the open-interest trend behind each move and a suggested strike to express the view.
A live view of where index option activity is concentrating, so you can see the levels the market is defending before you take a directional trade.
A multi-scan engine that groups stocks by the behaviour they are showing right now — momentum spurts, trend continuation, fresh strength — and lets you filter down to the ones you can actually trade.
A swing scanner built around institutional behaviour — which stocks keep showing accumulation, where their support and resistance sit, and how each one has performed since it first appeared.