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Trading has its own vocabulary, and it can feel like everyone assumes you already know it. Here's a quick reference for terms you'll run into constantly, in plain English.
Bid and ask: the "bid" is the price you can sell at, the "ask" is the price you can buy at. The small gap between them is the spread.
Balance: the total money in your account, not counting any trades you currently have open.
Equity: your balance plus or minus the current value of any open trades. This number moves in real time while a trade is open.
Margin: the portion of your account that's set aside as a deposit to keep a trade open. It's not lost money — it's "held" while the position is active.
Leverage: a tool that lets you control a larger trade than your account balance alone would allow.
Long / short: "going long" means you bought, expecting the price to rise. "Going short" means you sold first, expecting the price to fall so you can buy back cheaper later.
Pip: the smallest standard price movement in most currency pairs.
Stop-loss / take-profit: an automatic instruction that closes your trade at a preset price, either to limit a loss or to lock in a profit, so you don't have to watch the screen constantly.
Keep this guide handy — you'll likely come back to it while reading everything else.
Real-World Example
A new trader reads a forum post that simply says: went long EUR/USD at 1.0850, tight SL, TP at the next resistance, risking 1% of my account. Without knowing the vocabulary, that sentence is unreadable; with it, it translates instantly — bought EUR/USD expecting it to rise, placed a stop-loss close to the entry to limit downside, set a take-profit at a technical level, and sized the position so a loss costs only 1% of the account. Every one of those terms gets its own dedicated lesson elsewhere in this module, but recognizing them on sight is what turns trading discussion from noise into something actually usable.
This lesson is free — no purchase needed to keep learning.