Two lists. The first is terms that mean something particular in Pairlens. The second is ordinary trading vocabulary the rest of the docs assume you know, and if you are new, that is the one to skim first.
Pairlens terms
Account. A set of exchange, broker, or wallet credentials you have connected. Stored on this device only. See connect an exchange.
App Server. The optional backend behind sign-in, cross-device sync, the AI proxy, and cloud panels. The terminal is fully functional without one. It never sees exchange credentials and is never in the order path.
Assistant. The one AI chat in the terminal, docked at the bottom right or in the left nav rail, your choice, and mounted above every page. Its loop runs client-side over 113 tools, and its conversations are kept on your device unless you turn their sync on. It can propose trades. It cannot execute them unattended. See the AI assistant.
Bot. A Python strategy deployed to a market, evaluating on closed candles and acting on its own. Not an LLM. See bots.
Bridge. Moving one asset from one chain to another. Pairlens quotes and tracks transfers between the five EVM chains and Solana through the LI.FI aggregator, signed with the wallets you already connected. A Solana send is simulated against the chain before your key is fetched. See DEX and wallets.
Capability. What a plugin declares it provides, such as
market-data:candles, trading:orders, ai:inference, or theme:override.
The resolver picks the best plugin for each requested capability at runtime.
Connector. A plugin that talks to a venue: streams its data and routes its orders, directly from your machine. See connectors.
Deep search. The server-side third wave of instrument search, which sends your typed query to Pairlens Cloud. Consent-gated in Settings → Privacy. See market discovery.
Guardrail. A risk limit enforced in the order path itself: loss caps, position caps, trade caps, and the action taken when one is breached. Neither the AI nor a bot can raise one. See risk guardrails.
Hard lock. Sealing the credential vault, which stops live automation. Distinct from the terminal lock, which only covers the screen. See settings.
Instruments index. The searchable catalogue of tradeable instruments, assembled from a curated catalog, cached venue tables, and an optional cloud snapshot of listings metadata.
Pane / panel. A panel is a kind of view (Chart, Order Book, Watchlist). A pane is one instance of it in a workspace layout. Some panels are singletons: one per workspace. See panels.
Paper trading. Three different things depending on where you are: a venue’s own demo environment, a bot’s paper mode, or an assistant paper trade. They simulate different amounts of reality. See paper trading.
Plugin. The unit of extension. Connectors, AI providers, panels, indicators and themes are all plugins. Third-party plugins run in a sandbox and every package is cryptographically signed. See the Plugin SDK.
Protector. A way to unlock the credential vault: a vault password, a passkey, or Touch ID on macOS desktop. Each one wraps its own copy of the vault’s data key. See settings.
Proposal. An order the assistant has prepared but not placed. It renders as a confirm card and goes through the normal guarded order path once you approve it.
Sandbox. The isolated worker a third-party plugin runs in, with an explicit network allowlist. Community-signed plugins are always clamped to it.
Signal. The output of the deterministic strategy engine: breakout, EMA pullback, or mean reversion, plus a regime. Computed on demand from the candle buffer, never pushed by a connector. See strategies and backtests.
Standalone. Running with no App Server at all: no auth, no sync, no cloud panels, local persistence only. Everything market-related still works. See self-hosting.
Surface. Anything mounted that tells the assistant what it is showing, and
optionally publishes actions only it can perform. A workspace board publishes
add_pane and remove_pane; leave the board and they withdraw. See
the AI assistant.
Terminal lock. A password prompt in front of the screen. It stops the person at your desk. It does not stop armed bots, and it is not the vault.
Vault. The browser’s encrypted store for your exchange keys and wallet keys, opened by whichever protector you enrolled. On desktop, credentials live in your OS keychain instead. See the security model.
Venue. An exchange, broker, event exchange, NFT marketplace, or on-chain aggregator. Twenty-three ship in the box, plus the on-chain connectors.
Workspace. A saved arrangement of panes, with variables that bind them to a pair, venue, and account. See workspaces.
Market terms
Aggressor. The side that crossed the spread to get filled. What the tape reports, and the direction that moved price.
All-time high (ATH). The highest price an asset has ever traded at.
Ask / offer. The lowest price a seller will accept. The right side of the book.
Base and quote. The two halves of a pair. In BTC-USDT, BTC is the base
(what you are buying) and USDT is the quote (what you pay with). Sizes can be
expressed in either.
Basis. The gap between a perpetual and the spot index it tracks. Pairlens quotes it in basis points and annualised, so carry reads as a yield rather than as a price difference.
Bid. The highest price a buyer will pay. The left side of the book.
Candle. One mark on a chart, covering one slice of time and recording four numbers: the open, the high, the low and the close. See the chart.
Depth. How much size rests between the touch and a given price. What the depth curve plots.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA). Buying a fixed amount at regular intervals rather than all at once, which trades a worse best case for a better worst case.
Drawdown. How far you are down from your peak. The number that actually describes how a strategy feels to run.
Event contract. An instrument that pays one unit of collateral if its outcome resolves true and nothing if it does not. Priced between 0 and 1 and quoted in cents, so 53¢ reads as a 53% chance. See prediction markets.
Fill. A completed execution. Partial fills are normal on limit orders.
Floor price. The cheapest current ask across an NFT collection. It is what somebody is asking, not what a holder can get, which is why Pairlens marks holdings against the top offer instead. See NFT collections.
Fully diluted value (FDV). What a token would be worth if every token that will ever exist were already trading. Compare it to market cap: a large gap means supply is still coming.
Funding rate. The periodic payment between longs and shorts on a perpetual that keeps its price pinned near spot. Positive means longs pay shorts.
Gap. A jump between one bar’s close and the next bar’s open, with nothing traded in between. Common on stocks over a weekend, and the reason a stop-loss cannot always protect you at the price you set.
Gas. The fee paid to a blockchain to process a transaction, in that chain’s own token. See DEX and wallets.
Grouping / tick. The price increment the order book buckets levels into. The venue’s own tick is the floor.
Imbalance. The ratio of resting bid depth to ask depth. Suggestive, and easily manufactured, because resting orders can be cancelled.
Impermanent loss. The value a liquidity provider gives up because the pool sells them out of the rising asset and into the falling one. See DEX and wallets.
Level 1. The top of the book and nothing behind it: best bid, best ask, their sizes, and the spread. What a broker’s free stock feed carries, and what the Level 1 panel stands in for an order book with.
Limit order. Executes only at your price or better. May not fill.
Leverage. How much exposure you hold per unit of margin posted. It changes the margin a venue holds against a position, never the size of the position itself.
Liquidation cluster. A price bucket holding real force-order prints from a venue, measured rather than modelled. Pairlens collects them for Binance Futures; other venues get the estimate marks instead, and the pane says which it is drawing. See perpetual futures.
Liquidation price. The price at which a leveraged position no longer has enough margin behind it and the venue closes it for you. Pairlens shows an estimate on the ticket; the venue’s own number depends on your whole margin balance.
Liquidity. How much can trade without moving price. Read it from depth and from the spread, not from volume alone.
Long / short. Long means you profit if the price rises. Short means you profit if it falls. Buying an asset outright is a long; shorting needs a perpetual or a margin account.
Market cap. Price times the supply currently circulating. The number to compare two assets by, since price alone says nothing without supply.
Maker / taker. The maker rests an order; the taker crosses the spread to hit it. Most venues charge them differently.
Market order. Executes immediately against whatever is resting. Fills guaranteed, price is not.
Mid. The midpoint between best bid and best ask.
Moving average. The average closing price over the last N bars, redrawn each bar. The simplest way to read a trend. See indicators.
Notional. Price times size: the money a level or a print represents. Usually the more useful reading of the two.
Perpetual (perp). A futures contract with no expiry, held near spot by a funding rate. Sized in contracts, settled in a stablecoin or in dollars. See perpetual futures.
Reduce-only. An order flag that may shrink an open position but never open the opposite side. What makes closing a position safe to do twice.
Position. What you currently hold in one market, and by extension your exposure to it. Position sizing is deciding how large it should be, which follows from your stop rather than from your confidence. See risk guardrails.
Profit and loss (P&L). What a position or a period has made or lost. Unrealised is the paper gain on something you still hold; realised is what you actually banked by closing it.
Regime. Whether the market is trending or ranging, as classified by the strategy engine. Strategies that work in one fail in the other.
Rug pull. A token whose creator sells their entire holding at once, taking the price to zero. The specific risk the memecoin safety panel checks for.
Slippage. The gap between the price you expected and the price you got. A function of depth and order size.
Stop-loss. An order that closes your position automatically once price moves against you by a set amount. The single most useful risk tool there is, and the one most often skipped.
Support / resistance. A price where buying has repeatedly stopped a fall (support) or selling has repeatedly stopped a rise (resistance). See drawing tools.
Open interest. The total size currently open in a contract, on one venue. Rising open interest into a move means new money; falling means positions closing. Pairlens never sums it across venues, because the total would mean one exchange on a fresh install and three on a full one. See perpetual futures.
Outcome. One side of an event contract, Yes or No on a binary question, or one of several on a categorical one. Each outcome is its own instrument with its own book, and you can buy or sell either side.
Overround. The sum of every Yes price across an event’s outcomes. Over 100% is the book’s margin, which is why sweeping the whole field is not free money; under 100% is a field the book has not finished quoting. The event header and the basket ticket both state it.
Spot. Buying the asset itself, settled immediately. Pairlens trades spot. There are no margin positions, which is why the Positions tab is empty by design.
Spread. Best ask minus best bid. As a percentage, the cost of changing your mind, and the fastest comparison of liquidity across venues.
Sweep. Buying the N cheapest listings in an NFT collection in one order. A market buy sized in items, priced from the ask ladder rather than from the floor, because five items deep can cost well over five times the first one.
Take-profit. The mirror of a stop-loss: an order that closes your position once price moves in your favour by a set amount.
Tick size. The smallest price increment a venue accepts.
Timeframe. How much time one candle covers: 1m, 1h, 1D and so on. There is no correct one, only the one that matches how long you intend to hold.
Top offer. The best standing collection-wide bid on an NFT collection: the price a holder can sell any token into right now. The one number on that board a holder can actually act on.
Touch. The best bid and best ask: the top of the book.
Trait floor. The cheapest ask among the tokens carrying one trait value. On a mature collection this is where pricing actually happens, and the collection floor is only a headline.
Volume. How much traded in a period. A big price move on low volume convinces fewer people than the same move on high volume.
Wall. A level holding much more size than its neighbours. Real until it is cancelled, which is why the liquidity heatmap beats a single snapshot.