Finance runs on jargon, and jargon is where bad deals hide. If a word decides whether you make money — APY, unlock, ex-dividend, "real yield" — you deserve it in plain English. This is the BogusAPY glossary: every term we use on this site, translated. No definitions copied from a textbook's marketing department.
Pick a letter to browse. Every term lives on its own letter page — no endless scroll. (Use All if you want the whole dictionary on one screen, or search the page with Ctrl+F.)
A
AFFO (adjusted funds from operations) — For REITs, the cash earnings left after the real costs of keeping the buildings running. The number that tells you whether the dividend is actually covered.
Airdrop — Free tokens distributed to wallets, usually for using a platform early. Marketing, paid in dilution — the tokens come from somewhere, and it's the supply.
Altcoin — Any coin that isn't Bitcoin. Thousands exist; most are lottery tickets with whitepapers.
Ape in — To buy impulsively, in size, without research. Honest slang: it admits what happened.
APR (annual percentage rate) — The simple yearly rate, with no compounding. A 12% APR paid monthly is 1% a month, every month.
APR / APY — Yearly rate without compounding / with it. The gap between them is where marketing lives.
APY (annual percentage yield) — The yearly return with compounding counted in. APY is always the bigger-looking number, which is exactly why it's the one in the ads. This site exists because of the gap between the APY on the banner and the yield in your wallet. Run any pair side by side in our Yield Calculator.
Asset — Anything you own that has value: a stock, a coin, a house, cash.
ATH / ATL (all-time high / low) — The highest or lowest price an asset has ever traded at. "Down 84% from ATH" tells you more than the price does.
B
Bagholder — Someone still holding an asset long after the party ended and the price collapsed. Everyone becomes one eventually; the skill is in not staying one.
Bear market — A long slide, usually defined as down 20% or more from the highs. Bears swipe down; that's the mnemonic and the feeling.
Bid / ask / spread — The bid is what buyers offer, the ask is what sellers want, the spread is the gap. Wide spreads quietly tax every trade.
Bitcoin (BTC) — The first cryptocurrency (2009), capped at 21 million coins, secured by proof of work. On this site it's framed for what it is: an energy-backed currency — every coin in existence was issued against real electricity spent.
Blockchain — A shared ledger of transactions, written in batches (blocks) that can't be quietly edited afterward because each block fingerprints the one before it.
Breakout — Price pushing through a level it previously couldn't (resistance), usually on rising volume. A breakout on weak volume is a rumor.
Bridge — Software that moves assets between blockchains. Convenient, and historically the most-hacked category in crypto — bridges hold other people's money in one place, which attackers notice.
BTC / ETH / SOL — Bitcoin / Ethereum / Solana — the tickers of the three largest smart-money battlegrounds in crypto.
Bull market — A long climb. Bulls charge up. Everyone's a genius in one.
Burn — Permanently destroying tokens, reducing supply. Often announced loudly; check whether the burn rate beats the printing rate before applauding.
Buy the dip — Buying after a fall, betting it's temporary. Works until the dip keeps dipping.
C
CAGR (compound annual growth rate) — The smooth yearly growth rate that would get you from start to finish. Real markets never move that smoothly; CAGR is the average, not the ride.
Candlestick — One period's price story in a single shape: where it opened, closed, and the wicks where it wandered in between.
Capital — The money you put in. "Capital required" is the honest part of every yield pitch: how much you must lock up to earn the advertised amount.
Capital gains — Profit from selling something for more than you paid. In the U.S., held over a year usually means a lower "long-term" tax rate; under a year, it's taxed like wages.
CEX / DEX — Centralized exchange (a company custodies) / decentralized exchange (contracts, self-custody).
Circulating supply — Coins actually out in the world and tradable. Compare it with max supply: the gap is future selling pressure already scheduled.
Coin vs. token — A coin runs on its own blockchain (BTC, ETH, SOL). A token is issued on top of someone else's chain (most tokens live on Ethereum or Solana). Every review here states which one it's looking at, early — because a token's fate is partly its landlord's.
Cold storage / cold wallet — Crypto keys kept offline — a hardware device, a piece of paper — where internet thieves can't reach them. Where serious money sleeps.
Compounding — Earning returns on your returns. Wonderful when the yield is real; it's also how inflated APYs are manufactured on paper, by assuming you reinvest forever at a rate that won't last.
Correction — A drop of 10% or more from recent highs. Bigger than a dip, smaller than a crash, very common.
D
Day trading — Buying and selling within the same day. A competition against professionals and algorithms, fought with your own emotions as the referee.
DCA — Dollar-cost averaging: scheduled fixed-size buys.
Dead cat bounce — A brief, hopeless little rally inside a collapse. Named for the grim observation that even a dead cat bounces if it falls far enough.
DeFi (decentralized finance) — Lending, borrowing, and trading run by smart contracts instead of companies. The rates are real market rates — which means they can be 10% this week and 2% the next.
Degen — Short for "degenerate": a trader who embraces the gamble openly. Worn as a badge; priced as a warning.
Diamond hands / paper hands — Holding through anything (diamond) versus selling at the first wobble (paper). Diamond hands is a virtue right up until the asset goes to zero with you admiring your grip.
Diversification — Owning different things so one disaster can't take you out. The only free lunch in finance, and even it doesn't protect you in a real panic — it just means you bleed slower.
Dividend — Cash (sometimes stock) a company pays shareholders from its profits. Not guaranteed — boards can cut it, and struggling companies eventually do.
Dividend yield — Annual dividend ÷ price. A rising yield can mean a generous company or a collapsing price. Check which one before celebrating.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) — Buying a fixed amount on a schedule (say $10 a day) instead of all at once. It smooths your entry price and, more importantly, removes the "is today the day?" decision. Our calculator's DCA mode shows honestly when it beat lump-sum buying and when it didn't.
DRIP (dividend reinvestment plan) — Automatically using dividends to buy more shares. Compounding on autopilot.
DYOR (do your own research) — The polite way of saying "don't blame me." On this site it comes with sources, so you actually can.
E
Emissions — The schedule of new tokens a protocol prints, usually to pay rewards. Emissions are where most "yield" is born: new tokens handed to you while their price does whatever it does.
EPS — Earnings per share: profit divided by share count. The denominator of the P/E ratio.
ETF — Exchange-traded fund: a basket of assets in one tradable ticker. Spot Bitcoin ETFs hold actual BTC; futures ETFs hold contracts — not the same animal.
Ex-dividend date — The first day a stock trades without the right to the next dividend. Buy the day before and the dividend is yours; buy on the ex-date and the seller keeps it. The price typically drops by about the dividend amount that morning — the dividend isn't free money, it's money moved.
Exchange — A marketplace for buying and selling crypto. A CEX is centralized (a company holds your coins: Binance, Coinbase). A DEX is decentralized (smart contracts swap directly from your wallet: Uniswap, Bisq).
Exit liquidity — The buyers who purchase what early holders sell. In a token with heavy emissions and thin demand, later buyers are the exit liquidity. Always ask which side of that trade you're on.
Expense ratio — The yearly fee a fund skims from your money, in percent. 0.03% and 1% look similar and are not: over 30 years the 1% fund can eat a quarter of your ending balance.
F
Fakeout — A breakout that fails and snaps back, trapping everyone who chased it. One of our trading lessons is devoted to telling the two apart.
FDV — Fully diluted valuation: price × every token that will ever exist.
FDV (fully diluted valuation) — Price × max supply: what the project would be worth if every token existed today. A token at $50M market cap with a $2B FDV has $1.95B of future unlocking pointed at its buyers.
Fear & Greed Index — A 0–100 gauge of market mood (0 = extreme fear, 100 = extreme greed) built from volatility, momentum, and social signals. We cite it every morning — as a thermometer, not a trading signal.
FFO (funds from operations) — The REIT industry's earnings measure: net income plus depreciation and other add-backs, because buildings don't "wear out" on paper the way accounting pretends. AFFO is the stricter, more honest sibling.
FFO / AFFO — REIT earnings / REIT earnings after real maintenance costs. AFFO is the one that pays the dividend.
Fibonacci retracement — Chart levels (23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8%) where pullbacks often pause, drawn from ratios found all over nature and, for whatever reason, in markets. Works partly because everyone watches the same levels.
FOMO (fear of missing out) — The itch that makes people buy tops. The most profitable emotion in finance — for whoever is selling to it.
FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) — Negative talk, real or manufactured, meant to shake holders into selling. Sometimes it's manipulation; sometimes it's just the news.
G
Gas — The fee paid to a blockchain's validators to process your transaction. Named honestly: it's fuel, it's consumed, prices surge when traffic does.
gm — "Good morning," crypto's all-hours greeting and a small tribal handshake.
Golden cross / death cross — The 50-day average crossing above (golden, bullish story) or below (death, bearish story) the 200-day average. Lagging signals: they confirm trends more than they predict them.
H
Halving — Bitcoin's programmed event, roughly every four years, cutting the new coins paid to miners in half. Supply growth slows on a schedule nobody can vote to change.
HODL — A 2013 typo of "hold" that became doctrine: don't sell, no matter what. Strategy for Bitcoin; a slow-motion accident for most altcoins.
Hot wallet — A crypto wallet connected to the internet — convenient, and exposed. Exchanges keep most funds cold and a small slice hot for daily withdrawals; when a hot wallet gets drained, that's usually the whole story of a hack.
I
Impermanent loss — The quiet cost of providing liquidity to a trading pool: when prices move, you end up holding more of whichever asset fell. "Impermanent" until you withdraw, which is when it becomes permanent.
Inflation — The slow loss of purchasing power. Money under a mattress isn't "safe," it's a guaranteed small loss every year. Cash yielding less than inflation is shrinking politely.
IPO — Initial public offering: a company's first sale of stock to the public.
K
KYC — "Know your customer": the ID checks regulated exchanges must run. Why some platforms ask for your passport to sell you a meme.
L
L1 / L2 — Layer 1 base chain / Layer 2 network built on top of it.
Layer 1 / Layer 2 — Layer 1 is a base blockchain (Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana). Layer 2s are networks built on top to make it cheaper and faster, settling back to the base chain for security.
Leverage — Borrowed money used to size up a position. 10× leverage means a 10% move against you wipes you out. Leverage doesn't change whether you're right; it changes how much being wrong costs.
Limit order — An order that only fills at your price or better. Market order — fills right now at whatever the price is. In thin markets, that "whatever" can hurt.
Liquidity — How fast you can turn something into spendable money without moving its price. A savings account is perfectly liquid; a house is not; a thin crypto token is liquid right up until you try to sell yours.
Liquidity pool — A pile of two (or more) assets locked in a smart contract so others can trade against it. Depositors earn a slice of trading fees — and absorb the impermanent loss.
Long / short — Long means you profit if it rises (you own it). Short means you profit if it falls (you borrowed it, sold it, and hope to buy it back cheaper). Shorting has limited upside and unlimited risk — the worst asymmetry in markets.
Lump sum — Investing everything at once, the opposite of DCA. History says it wins more often than not — because markets rise more than they fall — and feels terrible more often than not.
M
MACD — Moving Average Convergence Divergence: a momentum indicator built from the gap between two moving averages. In plain terms, it shows whether the trend's engine is speeding up or slowing down. We read it in every daily brief.
Margin — Trading with money borrowed from your broker or exchange. The loan is real even when the trade is imaginary, and it can be called in at the worst moment.
Market cap (market capitalization) — Price × total shares (or coins). It's the size of the whole thing, not the price of one piece. A $1 token with 100 billion tokens is a $100 billion asset, not a "cheap" one.
Memecoin — A token whose value is a joke, a mascot, and momentum. Some make fortunes for early buyers; the median outcome is entertainment with a price.
Mining — Using computing power to secure a proof-of-work chain and earn its new coins. The energy cost is not a bug — it's what makes the ledger expensive to fake.
Moon / mooning — A price rocketing upward. "When moon?" is the eternal question of people who bought the top.
Moving average (MA) — The average price over the last N days, smoothing the noise. EMA weights recent days more; SMA treats all days equally. Price above its averages is an uptrend story; below, the opposite.
N
Net worth — Everything you own minus everything you owe. The only scoreboard that matters.
NFA — Not financial advice. The four most honest words in finance content — everything here is education and shoe-leather, never a personal recommendation.
NGMI / WAGMI — "Not gonna make it" / "we're all gonna make it." The two prophecies every community issues about itself and its rivals.
Node — A computer running a blockchain's software and keeping a copy of the ledger. More independent nodes, harder the network is to capture or rewrite.
O
Options: calls and puts — A call is the right to buy at a set price (strike) before a date (expiry); a put is the right to sell. You pay a premium for the right. Most options expire worthless — that's the business model of the people selling them.
Overbought / oversold — A run stretched so far, so fast, that a pause or bounce becomes likelier. Measured most often with RSI. Oversold does not mean "can't fall further" — things can stay oversold all the way down.
P
P/E — Price-to-earnings ratio: what you pay for each dollar of yearly profit. 15× is a sober stock; 159× is a story.
Pay date — The day the dividend actually lands in your account, usually a few weeks after the ex-date.
Payout ratio — The share of earnings paid out as dividends. Above 100% means paying out more than you earn — possible for a while, not forever.
PoW / PoS — Proof of work (security by energy) / proof of stake (security by deposit).
Preferred stock — A hybrid: a stock that behaves partly like a bond, paying a set dividend with priority over common stock, usually without meaningful voting power. Strategy's STRC — a variable-rate perpetual preferred, covered often here — is the modern crypto-adjacent example.
Principal — Your original money, before any gains or losses. "Protect your principal" means: don't lose the seed.
Private key / seed phrase — The master password to a wallet, usually shown as 12–24 words. Whoever has it has the money. There is no password reset, no support line, no exceptions.
Proof of reserves — An exchange's attempt to prove it actually holds the assets it owes customers, usually a snapshot of wallet balances on a given date. A snapshot proves what was there that day — not what was borrowed for the photo, and not what left the next morning. Always ask for the date.
Proof of stake (PoS) — Security by deposit instead of electricity: validators lock up coins and lose some if they cheat. Ethereum switched to it in 2022.
Proof of work (PoW) — Security by energy: miners burn electricity competing to write the next block, making fraud cost more than it pays. Bitcoin's design.
Pump and dump — Coordinated hype inflates a thin asset, the organizers sell into the crowd they created, the price implodes. Illegal in securities markets, depressingly common in small-cap crypto.
R
Real yield — Yield paid from actual revenue — fees people paid, interest borrowers paid — rather than from printing new tokens. Our favorite question on this site: is this yield revenue, inflation, a marketing budget, or other users' money? It has to be one of the four.
Record date — The day the company checks its books to see who owns shares and gets paid. Falls right after the ex-dividend date.
REIT — Real estate investment trust: property income, passed through as dividends.
REIT (real estate investment trust) — A company that owns income-producing property and must pay out at least 90% of taxable income as dividends. That's why REIT yields look fat — and why their payout coverage matters so much.
Rekt — Wrecked. Total, embarrassing loss. "Got rekt" is the past tense of leverage.
Risk — The chance the plan doesn't work, including the chance of losing some or all of your money. High promised yield is never generosity — it's the market pricing in risk you may not have spotted yet.
ROI (return on investment) — (Gain − cost) ÷ cost, as a percent. Simple, and easily gamed by leaving out fees, time, or the losses.
RSI (relative strength index) — A 0–100 momentum score. Above 70 is traditionally overbought, below 30 oversold. A compass, not a crystal ball — we publish it daily and respect it accordingly.
RSI / MACD — The two momentum gauges in every BogusAPY brief: how stretched a move is, and whether its engine is speeding up or slowing down.
Rug pull — A project's team vanishes with the money, or dumps its tokens and abandons the project. The exit is the business model.
S
Satoshi — The smallest unit of Bitcoin: 0.00000001 BTC. Also "Satoshi Nakamoto," the pseudonymous creator who vanished in 2011. A "sat" is the crypto cent.
SEC — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission: the referee of American markets, and the reason "earnings release" numbers can be trusted more than tweets.
Self-custody — Holding your own keys in your own wallet instead of trusting an exchange. The original crypto promise and its original responsibility: "not your keys, not your coins."
Short squeeze — When shorts rush to buy back at once and the price rockets, forcing more buying. Glorious if you're long, fatal if you're short.
Slippage — The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. Big on thin tokens, big orders, and fast markets.
Smart contract — Code living on a blockchain that executes agreements automatically when conditions are met. The vending-machine version of a contract: no staff, no mercy, bugs included.
Special dividend — A one-off payment outside the regular schedule, often after an asset sale. Never annualize it: a $13 special is not a $13-a-year habit.
Stablecoin — A token designed to hold a steady value, usually $1 (USDT, USDC, USDS). Backing ranges from audited bank deposits to algorithmic hope — read which one before trusting the peg.
Staking — Locking coins to help secure a proof-of-stake network and earn rewards. The rewards come from new issuance plus transaction fees — real, but partly paid in the very coin being diluted.
Stonks — Deliberately misspelled "stocks," used ironically when a trade defies all logic and works anyway. Or doesn't.
Stop-loss — A pre-set order to exit if price falls to a level, capping a loss before it becomes a disaster. Deciding it before you enter is the whole point.
Supertrend — A trend-following indicator that flips between "uptrend, stay in" and "downtrend, stay out" using volatility bands. We use it in the daily briefs as the plain-English trend light: green or red.
Support / resistance — Price levels where falls keep stopping (support: buyers show up) or rallies keep stalling (resistance: sellers show up). Floors and ceilings made of other people's orders.
Swing trading — Holding days to weeks to catch a "swing" in price, instead of minutes (day trading) or years (investing).
T
Tokenomics — A token's economic design: supply, emissions, who got what, and when their tokens unlock. The section of the pitch that decides whether early insiders eat first.
TVL — Total value locked in a DeFi protocol. Size, not safety.
TVL (total value locked) — The dollars sitting inside a DeFi protocol. A size metric, not a safety metric — most of it can leave in an afternoon.
U
Unlock / vesting / cliff — Tokens promised to teams and investors are usually locked, then released ("unlock") on a schedule, often starting with a big one-time "cliff." Unlock calendars are selling-pressure calendars. We check them in every review.
V
Validator — In proof of stake, the node operator who proposes and confirms blocks, posting their own coins as a bond for good behavior.
Volatility — How violently a price swings. High volatility isn't good or bad by itself; it's a tax on your sleep and a gift to traders.
Volume — How much changed hands. Moves on high volume carry conviction; moves on low volume are suspect.
W
Wallet — Software or hardware holding your keys (not the coins themselves — those live on the chain). Losing the wallet isn't losing the money if you kept the seed phrase; losing the seed phrase is losing everything.
Whale — A holder big enough that their buying or selling moves the market. When whales move, small fish feel the current — our morning briefs watch their wallets for exactly that reason.
Whitepaper — A project's founding document: what it claims to do and how. Reading one puts you ahead of most buyers; checking whether reality followed it puts you ahead of nearly all.
Y
Yield — The income an asset pays you, as a percent of its price. A $100 stock paying $4 a year yields 4%. If the price halves and the payment holds, the yield "doubles" — which is how yield traps are born.
Yield farming — Chasing the highest DeFi rewards by moving money between protocols. The yields are mostly emissions wearing a suit; farmers know it and race to sell before the music slows.
Yield trap — A stock or fund whose enormous yield exists because its price collapsed — usually right before the dividend gets cut too. The yield was the warning, not the opportunity.
YTD — Year to date: performance since January 1.
Missing a term you've seen here or out in the wild? This page grows. The rule for every entry is the site's rule: what it means, where the money comes from, and what it costs you if you get it wrong.
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Not financial advice.
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