Glossary
Finance, trading, and system acronyms you'll see across the docs
Plain-language definitions of the specialized terms Minara docs
throw at you. If you see an acronym or word you don't recognize,
check here first.
Terms are grouped by topic. Use Ctrl/Cmd + F to jump to one.
| Term | What it means | Example |
|---|
| Spot | Buying or selling an asset for immediate delivery at today's price. The "normal" way to trade. | Buying $100 of BTC right now. |
| Perps / Perpetual futures | Leveraged derivative contracts with no expiry. You bet on price direction with borrowed money. | "Long BTC 5x" borrows 4× your collateral so a +1% move becomes +5%. |
| Leverage | Multiplying your exposure. 5x leverage = you control 5× the position for the same capital. | Gains and losses are both 5× bigger. |
| Long | Betting the price goes up. | "Long ETH" = you profit if ETH rises. |
| Short | Betting the price goes down. | "Short BTC" = you profit if BTC falls. |
| DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging) | Buying a fixed dollar amount on a recurring schedule (weekly, monthly) regardless of price. | "$100 of BTC every Monday." |
| Swap | Exchanging one token for another via a DEX aggregator. | USDC → SOL on Jupiter. |
| Slippage | The difference between the price you expected and the price you got. Bigger orders on thinner markets → more slippage. | Quoted at $100, filled at $100.30 → 0.3% slippage. |
| Funding rate | Periodic payment (usually every 8h) between long and short perps holders to keep the perp price near spot. Positive = longs pay shorts. | High positive funding = longs are crowded. |
| Stop-loss | An order that automatically sells if price drops to a threshold — limits your downside. | Buy BTC at $65k with stop at $62k → max loss ~4.6%. |
| Take-profit | Mirror of stop-loss: auto-sells when price hits a profit target. | Long BTC with TP at +10%. |
| TP / SL | Short for Take-Profit / Stop-Loss. | |
| Aggregator / DEX aggregator | A router that finds the best price across many DEXs. | Jupiter, OKX DEX, 1inch. |
| Term | What it means | Example |
|---|
| Drawdown | Peak-to-trough decline from a portfolio's high water mark. | Portfolio hits $10k, drops to $8k → 20% drawdown. |
| PnL (Profit and Loss) | Realized or unrealized gain/loss on a position. | "Unrealized PnL: +$200" means you'd make $200 if you closed now. |
| Rebalancing | Selling some winners and buying some losers to return to a target allocation. | Target 50/50 BTC/ETH drifts to 60/40 → sell 10% BTC, buy 10% ETH. |
| Liquidation | When a leveraged position's collateral is exhausted and the exchange force-closes it. | Typically at ≥80% of initial margin lost. |
| Risk profile | Your tolerance for loss: Conservative / Moderate / Aggressive. Shapes how the agent frames advice. | Conservative → agent warns harder before perps. |
| Term | What it means | See also |
|---|
| TVL (Total Value Locked) | Dollar value of assets deposited in a protocol. Rising TVL ≈ user adoption. | DeFi analysis. |
| MVRV (Market Value to Realized Value) | Ratio of a coin's market cap to the aggregate cost basis of its holders. MVRV > 3 historically signals overheating; < 1 signals capitulation. | BTC cycle analysis. |
| LTH / STH (Long-Term / Short-Term Holder) | On-chain cohorts: LTH holds ≥155 days, STH < 155. Their behaviors diverge across cycles. | Cycle phase detection. |
| SOPR (Spent Output Profit Ratio) | Indicates whether spent outputs are in profit (SOPR > 1) or loss (< 1). | Market sentiment. |
| Funding rate | See Trading basics above. | |
| RSI (Relative Strength Index) | 14-period momentum oscillator 0–100. >70 often "overbought", <30 "oversold". | Technical analysis. |
| Volume | Dollar value of trades in a window. Rising price + rising volume = stronger signal than rising price alone. | |
| Fear & Greed Index | A 0–100 crypto sentiment score. Extreme fear (<20) historically coincided with buying opportunities. | |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| Whale | Someone (or wallet) holding enough to move prices. Typically ≥$1M position size. |
| KOL (Key Opinion Leader) | A social-media influencer whose posts move token prices. |
| Airdrop | Free tokens distributed to wallets that meet eligibility criteria (used an app, held a token, etc.). |
| Stablecoin | A token pegged to $1 (or another fiat). USDC, USDT, DAI. |
| Gas fee | The cost of getting a transaction included in a block. Varies by chain. |
| Mainnet / Testnet | Mainnet is the real chain with real money. Testnet is a sandbox with fake tokens. |
| Bridge | Moving assets between chains. Always riskier than single-chain actions. |
| Rug (pull) | A scam where developers drain liquidity after attracting investors. |
| Honeypot | A token you can buy but can't sell — often a scam contract. |
| pump.fun | A Solana platform for one-click meme-coin launches. Meme coins there are extremely speculative. |
| Term | What it means |
|---|
| ETF | Exchange-Traded Fund. A tradeable basket of assets (e.g. SPY tracks the S&P 500). |
| Equity | Stock in a company. |
| Futures | A contract to buy/sell an asset at a fixed price on a future date. Crypto perps are a futures variant without expiry. |
| FX / Forex | Foreign exchange — currency trading (USD/JPY, EUR/USD, etc.). |
| Index | A basket representing a market slice (S&P 500, NASDAQ, VIX volatility index). |
| Commodity | Physical goods traded as futures (gold, crude, wheat). |
| Macro | Economy-wide factors (interest rates, inflation, employment) that affect all asset classes. |
| Term | What it means | See also |
|---|
| Agent loop | The plan → call tool → observe → decide iteration that drives every turn. | Agent Loop |
| Skill | A declarative unit the agent can activate: prompt fragment + tool names + routing metadata. Think of it as a plugin. | Skills System |
| Scenario | A procedural playbook matched by the L0.5 intent classifier. Injects data-gathering steps + analysis framework for a turn. | Scenarios |
| Methodology | A quantitative rule attached to an asset class (e.g. "RSI > 70 → overbought"). Graduates from quarantine via Wilson lower bound. | Memory → Learning System |
| Role | A reasoning-case-memory partition attached to an analysis skill, with declared failureModes. Teaches the LLM from past mistakes. | Memory → Role Memory |
| Memory snapshot | A frozen per-session block of recent memories + user profile, injected once at session start. | Memory System |
| L0 / L0.5 / L1 / L3 | Stages in the skill-routing pipeline. L0 = deterministic pre-filter; L0.5 = scenario classifier; L1 = LLM-driven skill activation; L3 = risk gate. | Skills System |
| MCP (Model Context Protocol) | Anthropic's spec for exposing tools to LLMs. Minara uses its own in-house tool registry (NOT MCP) for core tools; MCP is only for external adapters. | MCP Servers |
| Tool tier | Permission levels 1–4 (READ_ONLY, CONFIRM_ONCE, ALWAYS_CONFIRM, MANUAL_ONLY) that gate fund-moving operations. | Safety & Sandboxing |
| Sandbox | The resolved filesystem root (~/.minara/sandbox/files/) every file tool must operate under. Blocks path-traversal + symlink escape. | |
| FTS5 | SQLite's full-text search extension. Used to index memories + role cases for BM25 recall. | |
| WAL | Write-Ahead Log — a SQLite mode that makes concurrent reads + writes faster and crash-safer. | |
| TTL (Time-To-Live) | How long a cached value stays valid. Prompt caches have a 5-minute TTL. | |
| BM25 | A ranking function for full-text search. Higher score = more relevant to the query. | |
| TF-IDF | Term Frequency × Inverse Document Frequency — a classic text-similarity metric used for dedup of methodology text. | |
| Jaccard similarity | Set-overlap similarity: |A ∩ B| / |A ∪ B|. Used for cache-invalidation drift detection + n-gram dedup. | |
| Wilson lower bound | Statistical 95%-confidence lower bound of a binomial success rate. A conservative "is this rule actually good?" score that penalizes small samples. | Learning System |
| Quarantine / graduation / demotion | States a methodology passes through. Starts quarantined (unused), graduates after ≥10 uses at ≥55% Wilson LB, demotes if Wilson drops below 0.40 after ≥20 uses. | |
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