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Plain-English guides to everything this site shows — what each market is, what moves it, and how to read the data. Educational content only, never investment advice.
70 guides · 172 glossary terms
Market Basics
How markets actually work: quotes, futures, liquidity, volatility, and the forces that move every price on this site.
Section hub →What Are Financial Markets?
A financial market is any system where buyers and sellers come together to trade an asset and, in doing so, agree on a price. This site tracks five… · 8 min read
How Market Quotes Work
A market quote is a snapshot of a financial instrument's price at a specific moment, showing not just the last traded price but also the bid, ask… · 6 min read
Spot vs Futures Prices
The price shown on most commodity tables is a futures price — an amount agreed today for delivery of a standardized quantity at a future date — not… · 6 min read
What Is a Futures Contract?
A futures contract is a legally binding agreement to buy or sell a specific asset — a set quantity, at a set price, on a set future date. Unlike… · 7 min read
Contango and Backwardation
Contango and backwardation describe the shape of a futures curve — the pattern of prices across different delivery dates for the same commodity or… · 6 min read
Market Liquidity, Explained
Market liquidity describes how easily an asset can be bought or sold in meaningful size without pushing its price significantly. A liquid market has… · 6 min read
What Is Volatility?
Volatility measures how much an asset's price swings over time — not which direction it moves, but how large the typical moves are. Realized… · 6 min read
Risk-On, Risk-Off: How Sentiment Moves Everything
Risk-on, risk-off describes a recurring pattern in financial markets where investor sentiment swings between appetite for reward and demand for… · 6 min read
Reading Price Charts
A price chart is a visual record of what a market paid for something over time — it shows nothing more, nothing less. This guide explains the two… · 7 min read
Day, Week, YTD, YoY: Reading Percentage Moves
The percentage-change columns on a market data table — Day, Week, Month, YTD, and YoY — each measure a different time window and answer a different… · 6 min read
Commodities
Energy, metals, and agriculture — what each market is, its units and benchmarks, and what drives the price.
Section hub →Commodities: The Complete Guide
Commodities are raw materials — from crude oil and natural gas to gold, copper, wheat, and coffee — that trade on global exchanges and form the… · 7 min read
Barrels, Bushels and Troy Ounces: Commodity Units
Commodity prices are quoted in units that vary wildly by market: oil trades by the barrel (42 US gallons), gold by the troy ounce (heavier than a… · 6 min read
What Moves Commodity Prices?
Commodity prices are driven by a recurring set of forces: physical supply and demand, inventory levels, weather, geopolitics, the strength of the US… · 6 min read
Crude Oil: WTI, Brent and What Moves Them
Crude oil is traded in two main global benchmarks: WTI (West Texas Intermediate), delivered at Cushing, Oklahoma, and Brent, sourced from the North… · 6 min read
Natural Gas: Henry Hub, TTF and Seasonality
Natural gas prices are quoted in two main regional benchmarks: Henry Hub in the United States (priced in dollars per MMBtu) and TTF in Europe (priced… · 7 min read
Gold: Why It Moves and Why It Matters
Gold is a commodity priced per troy ounce that traders and investors have historically used as a store of value and a hedge against uncertainty. Its… · 6 min read
Silver, Platinum and Palladium
Silver, platinum, and palladium are precious metals traded in troy ounces, each with a dual identity: part financial asset, part industrial raw… · 6 min read
Base Metals: Copper, Aluminum and Friends
Base metals are industrially essential metals — copper, aluminum, zinc, nickel, tin, and lead — traded primarily on the London Metal Exchange (LME)… · 7 min read
Agricultural Commodities: Grains, Softs and Livestock
Agricultural commodities cover three broad families: grains and oilseeds (corn, wheat, soybeans), soft commodities (coffee, sugar, cocoa, cotton)… · 6 min read
Lithium, Uranium and the Energy-Transition Metals
Lithium, cobalt, nickel, uranium, and rare-earth elements are the raw materials that power batteries, nuclear reactors, and electric motors at the… · 6 min read
Currencies & FX
The foreign-exchange market: pairs and pips, central banks, pegs and regimes, and what moves exchange rates.
Section hub →The Forex Market: The Complete Guide
The foreign exchange (forex) market is the largest financial market in the world, where currencies are bought and sold in pairs around the clock… · 7 min read
Currency Pairs: Base, Quote and What EURUSD Means
A currency pair shows how much of one currency it takes to buy another. In any pair, the currency listed first is the base currency and the currency… · 5 min read
Pips, Spreads and Reading an FX Quote
An FX quote shows two prices — the bid (what a dealer buys at) and the ask (what they sell at) — and the tiny gap between them, called the spread, is… · 6 min read
What Moves Exchange Rates?
Exchange rates move because of five main forces: interest-rate differences between countries, inflation gaps, trade and current-account balances… · 5 min read
Central Banks and Currencies
Central banks move currency values through three main tools: interest-rate decisions, quantitative easing or tightening, and direct intervention in… · 6 min read
The US Dollar Index (DXY)
The US Dollar Index, known by its ticker DXY, measures the value of the US dollar against a basket of six major currencies, with the euro making up… · 6 min read
Safe-Haven Currencies: Dollar, Yen and Franc
Safe-haven currencies are currencies that traders historically seek out during periods of global stress because they are seen as reliable stores of… · 6 min read
Emerging-Market Currencies
Emerging-market currencies are the money of developing economies — think the Brazilian real, Turkish lira, South African rand, or Indian rupee. They… · 6 min read
The Carry Trade, Explained
The carry trade is a strategy where traders borrow money in a low-interest-rate currency, convert it into a higher-interest-rate currency, and earn… · 6 min read
Currency Pegs, Regimes and Crises
A currency regime is the set of rules a government or central bank uses to manage its exchange rate — from a completely free float to a hard peg… · 8 min read
Crypto
Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, and the mechanics of a market that never closes.
Section hub →Cryptocurrency: The Complete Guide
Cryptocurrency is a category of digital assets that live on public blockchains — decentralized networks with no central issuer, no government… · 8 min read
What Is a Blockchain?
A blockchain is a shared digital ledger that records transactions in batches called blocks, with each block cryptographically linked to the one… · 6 min read
Bitcoin: Supply, Halvings and Mining
Bitcoin is a digital currency with a hard cap of 21 million coins, enforced by its code and secured by a global network of computers called miners.… · 6 min read
Ethereum and Smart Contracts
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain that runs self-executing code called smart contracts, allowing developers to build applications directly on a… · 6 min read
Stablecoins: Crypto's Dollars
A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a fixed value — almost always one US dollar — by backing each token with reserves, collateral, or a… · 6 min read
Altcoins, Tokens and Coins: What's the Difference?
An altcoin is any cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin, while a coin is native to its own blockchain and a token is issued on top of someone else's… · 6 min read
Crypto Market Cap and Dominance
Crypto market cap is the price of a coin multiplied by its circulating supply — the number of coins actually available to trade right now. It is the… · 5 min read
Exchanges, Wallets and Custody
Crypto exchanges are platforms where buyers and sellers trade digital assets, and they come in two main forms: centralized exchanges (CEXs), run by… · 6 min read
DeFi: Lending, DEXs and Yield
DeFi, short for decentralized finance, refers to financial services — lending, borrowing, trading, and earning yield — that run on self-executing… · 6 min read
Crypto Volatility and Market Cycles
Cryptocurrency markets are historically far more volatile than stocks, bonds, or most commodities, swinging 50–90% in either direction within a… · 7 min read
Stocks & Indexes
Indexes, earnings, sectors, dividends, and valuation — how equity markets are measured and read.
Section hub →Stock Indexes: The Complete Guide
A stock index compresses an entire market — sometimes hundreds or thousands of companies — into a single number, letting investors and economists… · 8 min read
How Stock Markets Work
A stock is a slice of ownership in a company, and a stock market is the continuous auction where buyers and sellers agree on a price for those slices… · 5 min read
Price-Weighted vs Cap-Weighted Indexes
Index weighting determines how much each stock influences an index's daily moves. Price-weighted indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial Average give… · 6 min read
Global Stock Markets: A Tour
Global stock markets follow the sun, opening in Asia, then Europe, then the Americas, with each session picking up sentiment from the one before.… · 5 min read
Earnings Season, Explained
Earnings season happens four times a year when publicly traded companies report their quarterly financial results, including earnings per share and… · 6 min read
Dividends: Yield, Dates and What They Signal
A dividend is a cash payment a company makes to its shareholders, usually expressed as a yield — the annual dividend divided by the current share… · 6 min read
Stock Splits and IPOs
A stock split divides existing shares into more pieces at a lower price each, leaving the company's total value unchanged — more shares, same pie. An… · 5 min read
Stock Sectors: Cyclicals, Defensives and the Map
Stock sectors divide the market into eleven industry families — from technology and financials to utilities and real estate — so investors and… · 6 min read
Valuation Basics: P/E, EPS and Market Cap
Valuation basics in stocks come down to three numbers: market cap (what the whole company is worth at today's price), earnings per share (the profit… · 7 min read
Bull Markets, Bear Markets and Corrections
A bull market is a sustained rise of 20% or more from a recent low; a bear market is a decline of 20% or more from a recent peak; and a correction is… · 6 min read
Bonds & Rates
Government yields, the curve, credit spreads, and how central banks move fixed income.
Section hub →The Bond Market: The Complete Guide
The bond market is where governments, companies, and other institutions borrow money by issuing tradable loans called bonds. Each bond carries a face… · 8 min read
Why Bond Prices and Yields Move Opposite
Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions because a bond pays a fixed coupon — when new bonds are issued at higher interest rates, older… · 6 min read
Government Bond Yields: The 10-Year Benchmark
A government bond yield is the annual return a lender earns for holding a country's debt, expressed as a percentage of the bond's price. The 10-year… · 6 min read
The Yield Curve, Explained
The yield curve is a line that plots interest rates (called yields) on government bonds of different maturities — from a few months out to 30 years —… · 5 min read
Yield-Curve Inversion: The Famous Recession Signal
The yield curve inverts when short-term government bond yields rise above long-term yields — the opposite of the normal pattern. The most-watched… · 6 min read
Duration: A Bond's Interest-Rate Sensitivity
Duration measures how sensitive a bond's price is to changes in interest rates — roughly, a bond with a duration of 7 will lose about 7% of its value… · 6 min read
Credit Ratings and Spreads
A credit rating is a letter-grade assessment of how likely a borrower is to repay its debt, running from the top-tier AAA down through… · 5 min read
Corporate vs Government Bonds
Corporate bonds are debt issued by companies; government bonds are debt issued by national governments. The key difference is credit risk… · 5 min read
How Government Bond Auctions Work
A government bond auction is the process by which a treasury or finance ministry sells newly issued bonds directly to investors, creating debt for… · 6 min read
QE, QT and How Central Banks Move Bonds
Central banks move bond markets through two main tools: the policy rate, which sets overnight borrowing costs, and the balance sheet, which they… · 7 min read
Economic Indicators
GDP, inflation, jobs, PMIs, and how to read the economic calendar like a pro.
Section hub →Economic Indicators: The Complete Guide
Economic indicators are official statistics — GDP, inflation, jobs reports, PMI surveys, and more — that measure the health and direction of an… · 8 min read
GDP: How Growth Is Measured
Gross domestic product (GDP) is the total value of all goods and services produced inside a country's borders in a given period. It is reported in… · 6 min read
Inflation and CPI: How Prices Are Measured
Inflation is the rate at which prices across an economy rise over time, and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is the most widely watched way to measure… · 5 min read
Jobs Data: Payrolls, Unemployment and Participation
US jobs data — released every first Friday of the month — measures how many jobs the economy added or lost, what share of people are unemployed, and… · 6 min read
Interest-Rate Decisions: How Central Banks Move Markets
A central bank interest-rate decision sets the "policy rate" — the baseline cost of borrowing money in an economy — and every financial market, from… · 6 min read
PMI Surveys: The 50 Line
A PMI (Purchasing Managers' Index) is a monthly survey that asks company purchasing managers whether business conditions improved, stayed the same… · 6 min read
How to Read the Economic Calendar
The economic calendar lists scheduled data releases — like jobs reports, inflation figures, and central bank decisions — along with three numbers… · 9 min read
Trade Balance and Current Account
The trade balance is the difference between what a country exports and what it imports — when exports exceed imports, the country runs a surplus… · 5 min read
Housing Data: Starts, Permits and Prices
Housing data tracks the construction and sale of homes through a chain of reports — building permits, housing starts, completions, and price indexes… · 6 min read
Confidence Surveys and Retail Sales
Retail sales measure how much consumers actually spent at stores and online in a given month, making them one of the most direct reads on economic… · 7 min read