Retail trading glossary
Last updated 11 September 2026 · 29 terms
Retail stock forums run on a dense private vocabulary. Most glossaries define the slang and stop there, which is the least useful half — knowing that “tendies” means profits does not help you, but knowing what a gamma squeeze mechanically requires, or what a convertible at a discount does to a share count, very much does.
So each entry below gives the definition, and then the part that matters: what is actually being claimed, and where the risk sits.
Ape
Noun · community identity
A self-applied label for a retail trader who is part of a coordinated community holding the same position, carrying an implied commitment not to sell during drawdowns.
The term does useful social work and is worth understanding for exactly that reason: it converts a trading position into a group identity. Positions held as identity are held longer and sized larger than positions held as trades, which is excellent for group cohesion and generally poor for risk management.
ATM offering
Noun · corporate finance
An at-the-market offering. A company registers a program allowing it to sell newly issued shares directly into the open market, at prevailing prices, whenever it chooses.
This is the mechanism that quietly ends a great many retail-driven runs. An ATM lets a company sell into exactly the volume and price strength that a sentiment spike creates, and it can do so without a separate announcement each time. If a small-cap is running hard on social attention, checking whether an active ATM exists is among the highest-value five minutes you can spend on SEC EDGAR.
Bagholder
Noun · position status
Someone still holding a position well below their entry price, typically after a sentiment-driven move has reversed.
The word is used as an insult, which obscures something worth noticing: at the top of any attention spike, most of the buyers are about to become bagholders, and none of them think they are the ones it will happen to.
Cashtag
Noun · social convention
A ticker symbol written with a leading dollar sign — $ZORX — so that
social platforms can index and link posts about a specific stock.
Cashtags are what makes retail sentiment measurable at all. They are also trivially gameable, and symbols that collide with ordinary words produce a steady stream of false positives in any naive mention count. See our methodology for how we handle that.
Catalyst
Noun · market mechanics
A specific, identifiable event that explains a price move: an SEC filing, a clinical trial result, a contract award, an earnings release, an index inclusion.
The honest question to ask of any loud ticker is simply “what is the catalyst, and can I read it myself?” If the answer is a forum post referring to another forum post, the catalyst is the attention itself — which is a real market force, but a very different and much shorter-lived one than a signed contract.
DD
Abbreviation · due diligence
A research write-up posted to a retail forum, usually long, usually formatted with headings and screenshots.
DD quality spans the full range from genuinely rigorous filing analysis to promotional material written by someone already positioned. The useful test is not length or confidence but falsifiability: does the post state what would prove it wrong, and does it link primary sources you can check without taking anyone's word for it?
Diamond hands
Noun · community norm
Holding a position through severe drawdowns without selling. Treated as a virtue within retail communities, frequently paired with the 💎🙌 emoji.
It describes a behaviour, not a strategy. Holding through a drawdown is correct when the original thesis is intact and wrong when it is not, and the phrase is specifically designed to discourage you from asking which of those applies.
Dilution
Noun · corporate finance
The reduction in each existing share’s claim on a company when new shares are issued. If a company doubles its share count, each old share now represents half as much of the same business.
Dilution is the single most common reason a retail-favoured small-cap fails to hold its gains. Companies that need capital raise it when their stock is strong and liquid — which is precisely the condition a sentiment spike creates. Attention and dilution are not unrelated events; the first one very often causes the second.
Float
Noun · market mechanics
The number of shares actually available for public trading, excluding restricted stock and shares held by insiders and affiliates.
Float, not market capitalisation, determines how violently a stock reacts to buying pressure. A company with 400 million shares outstanding but a 9 million share float trades like a much smaller company — in both directions.
FOMO
Abbreviation · fear of missing out
Buying primarily because a stock is already rising and everyone is discussing it.
FOMO is the emotion that a high Riot Score is measuring the aggregate of. That is worth sitting with: when the score is at its highest, the thing being measured is largely the feeling you are about to have.
FTD
Abbreviation · failure to deliver
A settlement failure: shares sold were not delivered to the buyer by the required settlement date. The SEC publishes FTD data twice monthly.
FTDs are real, published, and routinely over-interpreted. They arise from ordinary operational and market-making frictions as well as from abusive short selling, and elevated FTDs in a security are not by themselves evidence of manipulation or of an imminent squeeze.
Gamma squeeze
Noun · options mechanics
A feedback loop in which market makers who have sold call options hedge their exposure by buying the underlying stock. As the price rises, their required hedge grows, so they buy more, pushing the price higher again.
Unlike most forum theses, this one is mechanically real — and it has hard requirements: meaningful open interest at strikes near the current price, short-dated expiries, and enough option volume to matter relative to the float. It also unwinds symmetrically. The same hedging that drives price up sells the stock back down after expiry or on the way down, which is why gamma-driven moves so often round-trip within days.
Halt
Noun · market mechanics
A temporary suspension of trading. Volatility halts (LUDP) are automatic and brief. News
pending halts precede an announcement. An SEC trading suspension under code T12 is
a different matter entirely and can last ten business days.
The critical point for anyone trading attention-driven names: you cannot exit a position during a halt, and securities frequently reopen far below where they stopped. Regulatory suspensions in particular have historically been followed by severe, permanent declines.
HODL
Verb · community norm
To hold regardless of price action. Originated as a misspelling of “hold” in a 2013 bitcoin forum post and migrated into equity retail communities.
Functionally interchangeable with diamond hands, and subject to the same observation: it is a rule about what not to do, adopted specifically so the decision does not have to be revisited.
Low float
Adjective · market mechanics
A stock with a small number of freely tradable shares — in small-cap trading, often under 10 million.
Low-float names produce the percentage moves that fill screenshots, because modest dollar volume meets very little supply. The same thinness applies on exit: spreads widen, and getting out at the price on your screen is not guaranteed. Low float is not an edge, it is a volatility multiplier that works on both sides.
Meme stock
Noun · market phenomenon
A stock whose price is driven substantially by coordinated retail attention rather than by changes in the underlying business.
The category is real and the moves are real — attention is genuine buying pressure while it lasts. What distinguishes a meme move from a fundamental one is durability: nothing about the company has changed, so there is no new floor under the price when attention moves on. Measuring exactly that attention, and being explicit about what it does and does not imply, is the whole purpose of this publication.
MOASS
Abbreviation · mother of all short squeezes
A community thesis holding that a particular stock will undergo an unprecedented squeeze driven by hidden or synthetic short positions.
We report MOASS chatter because it is a large and measurable component of retail sentiment. We are also going to be plain about its status: it is a belief held within a community, not a measurable market condition, and it has now been imminent for several years. Treat mentions of it as sentiment data — which is exactly what they are — rather than as a forecast.
Paper hands
Noun · pejorative
An insult for selling early, particularly during a decline.
Worth flagging as a social mechanism rather than a trading concept: it attaches shame to the act of risk management. The people most active in applying it are not the ones exposed to your position.
Pump and dump
Noun · securities fraud
A scheme in which promoters build or acquire a position, inflate the price through misleading promotion, and sell into the demand they manufactured, leaving later buyers with the losses.
This is a criminal offence in the United States, not a trading style. The modern version rarely looks like a boiler room: it looks like organic enthusiasm, distributed across social accounts, newsletters and paid placements. The most reliable tell remains disclosure — Section 17(b) of the Securities Act requires anyone paid to promote a security to disclose the payer, amount and form of compensation. Content promoting a stock with no such disclosure anywhere on it is either unpaid or unlawful.
Reverse split
Noun · corporate action
A consolidation of existing shares into fewer, proportionally higher-priced shares — a 1-for-20 reverse split turns twenty $0.10 shares into one $2.00 share.
No value is created or destroyed at the moment it happens. What matters is why it is happening: most are done to regain compliance with an exchange’s minimum bid price, and a great many are followed by a fresh capital raise into the newly compliant share price. A reverse split announced alongside a shelf registration is a sequence worth recognising on sight.
Rug pull
Noun · informal
Borrowed from crypto: an abrupt collapse caused by insiders or promoters exiting en masse, leaving retail holders with the losses.
In equities the mechanism is usually less dramatic and entirely legal — a registered offering priced into a retail-driven spike achieves much the same distribution, in public, with a filing attached.
Shill
Noun · disclosure
Someone promoting a security while hiding compensation or an existing position.
The accusation is thrown around loosely, but the underlying standard is concrete and legal: if someone is paid to promote a security, US securities law requires them to disclose it on the promotion. We hold ourselves to that standard explicitly — see our Disclosures — and you should apply the same test to everything else you read, including well-produced research that arrives free.
Short interest
Noun · market data
The number of shares currently sold short, usually quoted as a percentage of float. Reported on a lag, twice monthly, by FINRA.
High short interest means a bearish position exists. It does not mean a squeeze is coming, and the figure you are reading is days or weeks old. “Days to cover” — short interest divided by average daily volume — is usually the more informative number, because it estimates how hard those positions would actually be to close.
Short squeeze
Noun · market mechanics
A sharp rise driven by short sellers buying shares to close positions, which pushes the price up further and forces more covering.
Real, and rarer than forum volume would suggest. A genuine squeeze needs high short interest relative to a small float, rising borrow costs, and a catalyst to start it. Crucially, covering is finite: once shorts are closed, that buying is gone and does not return, which is why squeeze moves retrace hard. Anticipated squeezes that never materialise vastly outnumber ones that do.
Stonk
Noun · slang
A deliberate misspelling of “stock”, used self-deprecatingly to signal that a position is being taken in a spirit of amusement rather than analysis.
Linguistically trivial, editorially useful: its presence in a post is a reasonably good marker that what follows is enthusiasm rather than research, which is a distinction worth making when scoring sentiment.
Tendies
Noun · slang
Trading profits. From “chicken tenders”.
Note the survivorship bias baked into the word: posted gains are overwhelmingly visible while losses are quietly closed, which systematically distorts any impression of how a community is actually performing.
Toxic financing
Noun · corporate finance
Convertible notes or preferred stock that convert into common shares at a discount to the prevailing market price, often with no floor.
This is the structure worth understanding above all others in the small-cap world. Because the conversion price falls as the stock falls, each conversion issues more shares than the last, which pushes the price down further, which makes the next conversion larger again. The share count can rise by orders of magnitude within a year. These instruments are disclosed in filings — look for convertible notes with variable conversion rates and a large share reserve.
YOLO
Verb · position sizing
To commit an outsized share of an account — frequently all of it — to a single speculative position, usually short-dated options.
Posted YOLOs are a sentiment signal we track, because concentrated conviction is genuinely informative about a community’s state. As a practice it is the single fastest route to a total loss, and the posts you see are not a representative sample of the outcomes.
A closing note. Fluency in this vocabulary is not an edge. Every term above describes either a real market mechanism you can verify in filings and public data, or a social norm designed to change how you behave with your own money. Learning to tell which is which is the entire skill.