The Coil trading glossary
Plain-English, honestly-framed definitions of the market-leadership, momentum and risk concepts Coil is built on — starting with the term we’re named after.
Every definition here is written to answer the question directly, then show how Coil actually uses the idea in a long-only, top-down system — index tape first, then sectors, then names. No hype, no forecasts; educational only.
Looking for Coil’s own terminology — buy score, entry windows, sector phase? That’s the agentic-trading glossary.
Coiled market ★
A coiled market is one where buyers and sellers have fought to a near-standstill, squeezing price into a progressively narrower range like a wound spr
200-day moving average
The 200-day moving average (200-DMA) is the average closing price of a security over its last 200 trading sessions, recalculated every day.
Breakout
A breakout is when a stock's price pushes decisively through a defined resistance level — a range top, prior high, or downtrend line — usually on risi
Market breadth
Market breadth measures how many stocks are participating in a move rather than just where the index closed.
Market leadership
Market leadership is the set of stocks and sectors that move first and move most, setting the tone for the broader market during a trend.
Maximum drawdown
Maximum drawdown (MDD) is the largest peak-to-trough decline an investment or strategy suffers over a period, measured as a percentage of the prior pe
Mean reversion
Mean reversion is the theory that an asset's price tends to drift back toward its historical average after reaching an extreme, so unusually high pric
Momentum investing
Momentum investing is a strategy that buys assets whose prices have already been rising and avoids or sells those that have been falling, on the premi
Relative strength
Relative strength (RS) measures how a stock, sector, or asset performs against a benchmark such as the S&P 500, or against its peer group, over the sa
Risk-on / risk-off
Risk-on / risk-off (RORO) is the market's swing between two moods: risk-on, when investors buy growth assets like equities, cyclicals, and high-yield
Sector rotation
Sector rotation is the movement of investment capital from one stock-market sector to another as the economic cycle advances.
Stage analysis
Stage analysis is a technical framework, popularized by Stan Weinstein, that sorts a stock's price cycle into four repeating stages: Stage 1 basing, S
Survivorship bias
Survivorship bias is the error of drawing conclusions from only the things that survived — funds still open, stocks still listed — while silently igno
Trailing stop
A trailing stop is a sell order that sits a set distance below the market price and moves up as the price rises, but never moves back down.
Trend following
Trend following is a rules-based strategy that enters in the direction of an established price trend — buying what is already rising, avoiding or sell
Volatility contraction
Volatility contraction is a stretch where a stock's daily price range narrows and trading volume dries up, forming progressively tighter pullbacks ins
See the concepts on a live board
Coil scores the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100 and a macro book every market morning — leadership, entry state and regime, all in one read. Try the free demo of the full dashboard.
Open the demo →Coil is software you install and run yourself, with your own brokerage credentials and capital. It is long-only and not investment advice, not a managed account, and not a signal service. This page is educational. All performance figures are research backtests — point-in-time and survivorship-free, not live or client returns; past performance does not predict future results.