Glossary

Plain meanings for the words these pages use.

The idea

Perpetual future (perp) — A futures contract with no expiry. A small recurring payment keeps its price near the real asset's price.

Funding — That payment. When more traders are betting an asset will rise than fall, the ones betting on a rise pay the ones betting on a fall. When the crowd flips, the payment flips with it.

Long — Betting the price goes up. Short — betting it goes down.

Delta — How much a position's value moves when the asset's price moves. Long has positive delta, short has negative delta.

Delta-neutral — Long and short at the same time, in roughly equal size, so it barely matters whether the price goes up or down. What is left over is what the position pays you, minus what it costs.

Hedge — The second trade that offsets the first. Hedged means the price risk has been taken out.

Spot — The real asset itself, bought outright.

Getting in and out

Share — Your slice of a vault.

Share price — What one share is worth. It rises and falls with the vault's value.

Pending deposit — Money you have sent that has not been converted into shares yet. It is not in the trade, and it earns nothing until it is.

Batch — Deposits are grouped and converted to shares together rather than one at a time, so that everyone in the group gets the same price.

Withdrawal queue — Requests waiting to be paid. The seven-day delay on the delta-neutral vault is built into the contract.

Slippage — Getting a worse price than the one quoted, because there was not enough trading at that moment to fill the order.

Cap — The most a vault will hold. Only the AI Trading farm vaults are capped. At the cap, deposits close.

High-water mark — The highest point a vault has reached. A performance fee is only charged above it, and only on the farm vaults.

Risk words

Leverage — Borrowed exposure. A leveraged position is larger than the money behind it, so a move against you can wipe that money out.

Margin — The money set aside to hold a leveraged position open.

Liquidation — What happens when a leveraged position runs out of margin. The exchange closes it automatically.

Drawdown — The fall from a peak. A 20% drawdown means the account is 20% below its highest point.

The bots

Bot — What trades the capital. The trading bot is our own AI model, acting on its own signals; the points bot runs no AI model and trades to earn venue points.

Farm vault — The product that gives you exposure to the bots. AI Trading Arcus Farm and AI Trading RISEx Farm.

Points — An exchange's reward programme for trading activity. Usually a claim on something the exchange has not launched yet.