ORB Trading Glossary
A working glossary for opening range trading. Terms used loosely and what they need to mean inside a rule, vocabulary borrowed from other disciplines, and words that shift meaning between equities, futures and currencies.
Vocabulary Is Where Disagreements Start
Two people can discuss the same setup for an hour and disagree about nothing except what their words mean. Trading vocabulary grew informally, mostly in conversation, and much of it was never given a precise definition because none was needed at the time. That works in conversation. It stops working the moment a term has to be written into a rule, tested against history, or explained to somebody who will act on it, because a rule built on a vague word is a vague rule.
Loose Terms Travel Well and Test Badly
A word like breakout or confirmation carries an obvious meaning until you try to write it down as a condition. How far past the level counts? Measured on a close or on a touch? Within what period? Each of these has to be answered before the term can be applied consistently, and the answers are choices rather than discoveries. The looseness is not laziness. It is what lets the word cover a family of related things, and it has to be resolved before the word can do any work.
Words Borrowed From Elsewhere
Trading has absorbed vocabulary from statistics, from physics, from options and from ordinary speech, and the borrowed words arrive carrying their original meanings. Some of those meanings survive the trip intact and some are transformed beyond recognition, which produces confident conversations between people using the same term for different concepts. The imported words repay checking, because their familiarity is exactly what stops anyone from asking what they are supposed to mean here.
The Same Word in Two Markets
Markets developed their own dialects. A term settled among equity traders can mean something adjacent but distinct among futures traders, and something else again in currencies, where the underlying structure differs. The differences are usually small enough to go unnoticed and large enough to matter, particularly when a method described in one market gets applied in another and the vocabulary comes along unexamined.
What This Site Contains
The entries here take terms used in and around opening range trading and set out what each one is doing. Where a word is used loosely, the alternatives it covers are separated. Where it was borrowed, the original sense is given alongside the trading one. Where it differs by market, the differences are stated plainly. The aim is not to declare one usage correct but to make the ambiguity visible, so a definition can be chosen deliberately rather than inherited by accident.
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Borrowed Vocabulary That Causes Real Confusion
2026-09-03
A large part of trading vocabulary was taken from somewhere else. Statistics supplied several words, physics supplied a few by analogy, options trading supplied more, and ordinary speech supplied the rest. Borrowed words arrive with their original meanings attached, and readers who know the source discipline hear something the writer may not have intended. The mismatches are systematic enough to be worth listing.
Volatility
In statistics and in options, volatility is a precise quantity: the standard deviation of returns, usually annualised, sometimes implied by option prices rather than measured from history. It has units, it has a calculation, and two people computing it from the same data arrive at the same number.
In common trading speech it means something much looser, closer to how much the market is moving around, and it often describes a single session or even a short stretch of bars. Neither usage is wrong, but a claim that a strategy performs well in high volatility means different things depending on which is meant. The statistical version is testable. The impressionistic version is not, and the two frequently disagree, because a market can travel a long way smoothly or very little in a jagged fashion.
Momentum
Momentum is borrowed from physics, where it is mass times velocity and is conserved. Neither part transfers. There is no mass, and nothing is conserved, so the physical intuition that a moving object continues unless acted upon has no counterpart in a market.
The word also has a technical meaning in finance, referring to the empirical tendency of past returns to persist over certain horizons, which is a measured statistical property rather than a metaphor. And it has an indicator meaning, referring to a specific calculation plotted on a chart. A trader saying a move has momentum is usually using none of these three and simply means it is moving quickly, which is fine so long as nobody reasons from the physics.
Support and Resistance
These come from engineering by analogy, and the analogy carries an implication worth examining. A physical support holds a load because of what it is made of. A price level holds because participants place orders there, which is entirely different: the level has no properties of its own and exists only while people are acting on it.
The practical consequence is that a level can stop working without anything visible changing. The orders that made it a level were filled or cancelled, and what remains is a line on a chart with nothing behind it. The engineering metaphor also suggests a level weakens with repeated tests, in the way a material fatigues, which is a physical intuition rather than an observation about order flow.
Edge and Expectancy
Edge is borrowed from gambling, where it has a precise meaning: the expected value per unit staked, known in advance because the probabilities are known. In markets the probabilities are not known. They are estimated from a limited sample, and they change. The word carries a confidence its trading usage cannot support.
Expectancy is the same quantity under a more formal name and with the same problem. Both are calculated from historical results and then discussed as though they were properties of the strategy rather than estimates drawn from a sample. The gambling sense implies a fixed, knowable number. The trading sense is a measurement with uncertainty around it, and the borrowed word quietly discards the uncertainty.
A Habit Worth Having
The check is short. When a term feels technical, ask where it came from and whether the original meaning is the one being used. If it is, the term is doing real work and can be treated precisely. If it is not, the word is functioning as a metaphor, and metaphors are useful for description and unreliable for reasoning.
The words that cause the most trouble are the ones that sound most authoritative, because their apparent precision discourages the question. A vague word invites clarification. A borrowed technical term does not, and that is exactly why it can carry an unexamined assumption a very long way.
One Word, Different Meanings in Different Markets
2026-09-03
Methods travel between markets more easily than vocabulary does. An approach described by an index trader gets picked up by someone trading currencies, and the words come along unchanged while the things they refer to do not. The resulting confusion is quiet, because everyone involved recognises the terms and nobody has any reason to ask.
The Open
In equities and index futures the open is an event: an auction at a stated time, with accumulated orders released together and a genuine discontinuity from the previous close. In currencies there is no such event, only a handover between regions, and the open is whatever a trader has chosen to call it. In markets that trade nearly around the clock with a brief daily halt, the open is a resumption rather than a beginning, and the price at that moment is usually close to the price before the halt.
An opening range rule assumes the first sense. Applied where the open is a resumption, the initial period contains a continuation of what was already under way rather than a fresh discovery, and the range formed describes something different even though the procedure was identical.
Volume
On an exchange, volume is a reported figure: the number of contracts or shares that changed hands, published by the venue and identical for everyone looking at it. In a decentralised market there is no such figure, because there is no central venue counting. What charting platforms display for currency pairs is generally a tick count, recording how many times the price updated on that particular feed.
Tick count correlates with activity and is not useless. It is also feed dependent, so two traders comparing volume on the same pair may be looking at genuinely different numbers. Any rule referencing volume needs to know which of these it means, and a rule ported from an exchange traded market into a decentralised one is referencing a quantity that does not exist there.
A Point
Point is among the most overloaded words available. In an index it is a unit of the index itself. In a futures contract it is that unit multiplied by a contract specific value, so a point on one contract is worth a different amount from a point on another. In currencies the equivalent small unit is conventionally called something else, and its size differs between pairs depending on how each pair is quoted.
This matters directly for anything involving stop distances or position sizing, since the whole calculation runs on converting price distance into money. A stop of a stated number of points means nothing until the instrument is specified, and a rule expressed in points is not portable between instruments even within one market.
The Session
A session in equities is the exchange's trading hours, with a defined start and end and often a distinct period before and after. In futures the session may run nearly continuously, with an administrative daily boundary that corresponds to no change in activity at all. In currencies, session refers to regional activity periods that overlap each other and have no official hours.
So a statement about a strategy working within the session is precise in the first market, ambiguous in the second and a matter of definition in the third. When a rule includes a time based condition, that condition is anchored to whichever meaning its original author had, and porting it requires deciding which local equivalent is intended rather than copying across the clock times.
Translating Instead of Copying
The useful discipline when taking a method from one market to another is to ask, for each term in it, what the term refers to in the source market and what the closest structural equivalent is in the destination. Sometimes there is a clean equivalent. Sometimes, as with volume in a decentralised market, there is not, and the honest conclusion is that part of the method does not transfer.
The failure mode is copying the words and assuming the referents came with them. The rule then runs, produces results, and those results get attributed to the method rather than to a definitional mismatch introduced at the border between two markets that use the same vocabulary for different things.
Terms Traders Use Loosely and What They Should Mean
2026-09-03
Most trading vocabulary was built for conversation, where shared context fills the gaps. Written into a rule, the gaps become the rule. A word that means roughly the right thing to a listener means nothing at all to a test, and the process of pinning it down usually reveals that several different ideas were sharing one label.
Breakout
A breakout is price moving beyond a level. That sentence contains three unresolved questions. Beyond by how much, since price touching the level to the tick and stopping is not usually what anyone means. Measured how, since a touch, a close beyond, and a sustained period beyond are three different events that occur at different times and produce different trades. And on what timeframe, since a close beyond on a one minute bar and a close beyond on a fifteen minute bar can be several minutes apart.
None of these has a correct answer. Each is a choice, and the choices interact: a small threshold with a closing requirement behaves quite differently from a large threshold with a touch requirement. What matters is that the choice is made and recorded, because a rule that says enter on the breakout has not specified an entry.
Confirmation
Confirmation is the least specified word in common use, and it covers at least three separate things. Sometimes it means an additional condition required before entry, such as a close beyond the level. Sometimes it means a second event after entry that increases confidence, such as a successful retest. And sometimes it means nothing beyond a general sense that the move looks convincing.
The first is a rule and can be tested. The second is an observation and may inform management. The third is not a definition at all. When someone says they wait for confirmation, the useful follow up is what event, specifically, and what they do if it never arrives. That question separates the three uses immediately.
Failed
A failed breakout is usually described as one that reverses. Reverses by how much, and within what time? A break that runs a distance, comes back to the level, and then continues did not fail. A break that never left the vicinity and slipped back inside within a minute plainly did. Between those lies most of what actually happens.
The definition matters because failure rates get quoted. A statement about how often breakouts fail is meaningless without the definition attached, and two people arguing about that rate are frequently in complete agreement about the market and in disagreement about the word. Tying it to a stated condition, such as price closing back inside the range within a defined period, makes the claim checkable.
Range
Range means the interval between a high and a low, which sounds unambiguous until you ask which high and which low. The opening range for a stated period is one thing. The day's range so far is another. A range as a market condition, meaning a market that is not trending, is a third and unrelated sense that happens to use the same word.
The third usage causes the most trouble, because it describes behaviour rather than measuring anything, and it is frequently applied after the fact. A market gets called ranging once it has stopped trending, which is a statement about the past presented as a characterisation of the present.
Why This Is Worth the Trouble
Precision here is not about winning an argument. It is that an imprecise term cannot be tested, cannot be written into a rule, and cannot be reliably applied twice in the same way. A trader who defines a breakout as a close beyond the level by a stated amount will take the same trades this month as last. A trader working from the general sense of the word will take different trades depending on how the previous session went, and their record will measure their mood rather than their method.
The definitions do not have to match anyone else's. They have to be stated, stable, and specific enough that a rule built on them returns the same answer every time it meets the same data. That is a low bar, and a surprising amount of trading vocabulary fails it.
