Want To Chat GameStop, AMC Stock Technicals With The Apes? 10 Common Stock Trading Acronyms To Boost Your Market Vocabulary

Retail investors have continued to build up their pull on the markets during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the first six months of 2021, nonprofessional traders opened more than 10 million new trading accounts — matching the total number of accounts opened in all of 2020.

The traders have banded together on various social media rooms to upend hedge funds and institutions by driving stocks such as AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc AMC and GameStop Corporation GME up parabolically on a number of separate occasions. 

For a new trader or investor, reading or participating in stock trading groups such as on Reddit or Twitter can be intimidating. More advanced members of the groups use lingo, terminology and acronyms that can be difficult to decipher.

Retail traders searching through social media sites or bull boards to help with DD (Due Diligence) may want to take a look at the 10 most commonly used acronyms before they YOLO (You Only Live Once) into a popular trade.

See Also: How to Read Candlestick Charts for Beginners

Below is a look at 10 commonly used acronyms in trading communities:

• EOD: End Of Day – Usually used in reference to the end of the trading day, which is 4 p.m. ET for stocks
• and midnight for cryptocurrencies.
• PT: Price Target – Analysts regularly provide price targets on individual equities they cover, but within social media communities, users will often provide a price target for a stock based on charting or DD.
• HOD: High of Day – the highest price a stock traded at within a single trading session.
• ATH: All-Time High – the highest price at which an individual stock has traded.
• IPO: Initial Public Offering – The process where a private company goes public and issues shares of its company for sale to public investors.
• SL: Stop Loss – A stop loss is a price limit entered, or adhered to mentally, where a trader has decided to sell a stock to lock in profit or to avoid taking more loss than what is expected.
• WOP: Window Of Opportunity – Used to explain when a trader believes is the best time to add a position in a security in order to make the largest gain.
• MA: Moving Average – Technical traders add moving averages to their charts to measure price data points over time to analyze trends. Traders may use EMA (exponential moving average), which gives more weight to current data points and/or SMA (simple moving average), which gives each data point equal weight.
• SS or S/S - Short Seller – A trader who has taken a position in a stock in hopes that the security declines in price. Short sellers add downward pressure to stocks, while buyers (or bulls) add upward pressure.
• L/F: Low Float – The float is the total number of free shares available to investors. When a company has a smaller number of shares available, and there becomes a high demand for the stock, the price can rise more dramatically than on a stock with a large float.

And, last but not least, LFG: Let's F---ing Go!

See Also: 8 Best Technical Analysis Courses 2021