Every field has its own vocabulary, and trading front-loads a lot of it early. You'll hit most of these terms in your first few weeks, often several in the same sentence. Here they are in plain language, grouped by what they're actually for, not alphabetical order.

Reading a chart

Candlestick: A single bar on a price chart showing four numbers at once: the opening price, closing price, and the high and low for that period. The "body" shows open-to-close; the thin lines above and below (the wicks) show how far price wandered beyond that before settling.

Support: A price level where a stock has historically stopped falling and turned back up, because enough buyers stepped in at that price. It's not a guarantee, just a level worth watching.

Resistance: The opposite of support: a price level where a stock has historically struggled to push higher, because sellers tend to show up there.

Moving Average: The average closing price over a set number of days (commonly 50, 150, or 200), plotted as a smooth line that updates daily. It filters out day-to-day noise so you can see the underlying trend.

Volume: The number of shares traded in a given period. A price move on high volume carries more weight than the same move on a quiet day, since more market participants agreed on it.

Finding a setup

Trend Template : A specific checklist of moving-average and price conditions a stock needs to meet before it's even worth considering, popularized by Mark Minervini. We walk through it in full on The Framework.

Relative Strength (RS): A measure of how a stock is performing compared to the broader market, not just compared to its own past. A stock can be "up" and still have weak relative strength if the rest of the market is up more.

Volatility Contraction Pattern (VCP): A pattern where a stock's price swings get tighter and tighter over several pullbacks, each shallower than the last, as selling pressure dries up before a potential breakout. Also covered on The Framework page.

Pivot Point: The specific price level where a stock breaks out of a base or contraction pattern, on a surge in volume. This is typically the entry trigger, not the moving-average conditions that came before it.

Breakout: When price moves decisively above a resistance level or out of a chart pattern, usually on higher-than-average volume.

52-Week High/Low: The highest and lowest prices a stock has traded at over the past year. Where a stock currently sits relative to these two numbers is a quick gut-check on its overall trend.

Risk and rules

Stop-Loss: A predetermined price at which you'll exit a losing position, decided before you enter, not while you're already in the trade watching it move against you.

Position Sizing: How much of your capital you put into any single trade. Two trades can have the same entry and stop-loss and still carry very different risk, depending on size alone.

Risk-Reward Ratio: A comparison of how much you stand to lose if the trade fails against how much you stand to gain if it works. A trade risking ₹1 to potentially make ₹3 has a 1:3 ratio.

Drawdown: The decline from a peak in your account's value to a subsequent low, usually expressed as a percentage. It's the standard way to measure how painful a losing stretch actually was, not just whether it happened.

Orders and mechanics

Swing Trade: A position held for several days to a few weeks, built around one identifiable price move rather than intraday fluctuations or a multi-year hold.

Market Order: An order to buy or sell immediately at the best available price. Fast, but you don't control the exact price you get.

Limit Order: An order to buy or sell only at a specific price or better. You control the price; you don't control whether the order fills at all.

Delivery Trade: A trade where you take actual ownership of the shares, holding overnight, as opposed to an intraday trade that's squared off the same day. Swing trades are delivery trades by definition, and most Indian discount brokers don't charge brokerage on them.

Watchlist: A shortlist of stocks you're actively monitoring because they meet your criteria, even though none of them have triggered an actual entry yet. Most of the work in swing trading happens here, not in the trades themselves.

Twenty terms is enough to follow along with everything else on this site, but not enough to trade on its own. If you want to see how these pieces actually fit together into a repeatable process, that's what The Framework is for.

This article is for educational purposes only. Swiing is not a stock recommendation company and does not provide investment advisory or money management services. Nothing here should be construed as financial advice. Trading involves risk of loss, and past performance is not a guarantee of future results.