Trading 101

Trading 101

Terminology

• Ask

  An offer to sell shares at a given price.

• Alpha

  Return over index. The holy grail. If your comparison returns 5% and you return 20% then that extra 15% is alpha. Any mediocre trader will tell you that all of their trades generate “alpha.”

• Average down

  Averaging down refers to when you already bought shares, but the price has moved lower so you decide to buy more reduce your average cost per share. But you’re not average, are you?

• Bid

  An offer to buy shares at a given price.

• Bps

  Stands for basis points, equal to 1/10th of a percent, or 0.001. Pronounced “bips”. Rhymes with “chips”.

• Commission

  The fee charged by Jock MKT per trade.

• Correlate

  An enemy of diversification. An example is the scoring for the QB and WR on the same team would be highly correlated. “Stacking” strategies have high correlation between players.

• Diversify

  To reduce your risk (or correlation) by allocating capital across various players. Owning shares of multiple players protects against the downside of one of them getting injured.

• Exit

  Selling 100% of a position.

• Exposure

  Your potential for loss to a particular outcome, e.g. a specific game, team or player. If you choose to “stack” players from one game then you might say you’re overexposed to that game.

• High Price

  The highest traded price recorded per player during the contest.

• Holding

  A single set of shares that you currently own.

• IPO (Initial Player Offering)

  Offering of shares prior to games where users bid on shares of players. 30 minutes before the first game starts, shares are released to the highest bidders.

• Last Trade

  Price at which shares of a certain player were last traded.

• Liquidate

  To sell or convert to cash.

• Liquidity

  This refers to the amount of action or trading volume for specific shares or market. If something is highly liquid, that means it can easily be converted to cash.

• Low Price

  The lowest traded price recorded per player during the contest.

• Portfolio

  This is a collection of all your holdings or shares, as well as your other assets and cash equivalents. Make sure it’s diversified!

• Realized gain (or loss)

  This means you took your gains and put positive money in your pocket. Very different than “paper gain,” see unrealized.

• ROI

  Return on investment. Profit divided by cost.

• Shares

  Equal parts into which a player’s ownership is divided. Owning a share entitles you to payout at the conclusion of the contest based on rankings.

• Spread

  The difference between Bid and Ask

• Ten bagger

  A single investment that increased by 10x. Say you invested $100 then that means you exited for $1,000. “Ten” can be replaced by any number, but obviously much less impressive, e.g. fourbagger or 4x.

• Unrealized gain or loss

  When someone says “paper gain” they are referring to unrealized. This means that they still own their shares, but if they sold at current value then they’d be up money.

• Variance

  This is a measure of risk. It is typically referring to the returns across some distribution when compared to the average or what was expected. If there are a lot of outlier returns (either very positive or negative) then you might say it has a high variance.

• Volatility

  This is another measure of risk. The bigger the price swings, the higher the volatility. Think of it like your boom / bust WR. They can put up a huge game and win you the week, but they can also not show up against a top defense.

• Volume

  The amount of shares traded over some time period

• Second Price Auction

  Winning bids pay $0.05 more than the second highest bid.