The vocabulary that comes up when you practise reading intraday charts. Definitions first — each one is meant to be true of the term generally, not just true of how SwipeTA happens to use it. Where we do use a term in a particular way, that is said separately.
Also: day trading timeframe
Within a single trading day. An intraday chart shows price movement during one session rather than one point per day, and an intraday trade is opened and closed before the session ends.
In SwipeTA：Every SwipeTA question is intraday: one US equity session, at 5-minute resolution, regular hours only (09:30–15:59 ET).
Also: candlestick, bar
One block of time on a chart, drawn to show four prices: where it opened, where it closed, and the highest and lowest it traded in between. A 5-minute candle summarises five minutes of trading.
In SwipeTA：SwipeTA charts are built from 5-minute candles, and up to 40 of them are visible at once — roughly half a trading day.
The moment a chart is frozen for the purpose of asking what happens next. Everything before it is visible; everything after it is withheld.
In SwipeTA：Our own term for the last visible candle in a question. It is never in the first 30 minutes of a session, so there is always a session to read rather than one opening candle.
How far ahead a prediction reaches. A directional question is meaningless without one: 'will it go up' is only answerable relative to some later moment.
In SwipeTA：SwipeTA's horizon is 15 minutes — three 5-minute candles after the decision point.
A prediction about which way price moves next, with no position size, entry, exit or holding period attached. It is the smallest possible unit of a market opinion.
In SwipeTA：This is the entire question. There is no order ticket, no stop and no target — just up or down over the horizon.
Also: lookahead bias
The error of using information in an analysis that would not have been available at the time being analysed. It makes historical testing look far better than reality, because the test quietly knows the answer.
In SwipeTA：The failure a chart quiz is most likely to commit. Everything shown in a SwipeTA question — candles, VWAP, session markers, tags — is computed only from bars up to and including the decision point.
The tendency to see a past outcome as having been more predictable than it was. Looking at a completed chart, the turning points appear obvious; at the time, they were one possibility among several.
In SwipeTA：The reason a chart is cropped at the decision point rather than drawn in full and masked. Seeing the shape of the whole session, even blurred, changes what you think you would have done.
Also: volume-weighted average price
The average price traded over a period, weighted by volume, so prices where more shares changed hands count for more. Intraday it is usually anchored to the opening bell and rebuilt each session.
In SwipeTA：Drawn on every question chart, accumulated from the session open to the decision point and no further.
Also: average true range
A measure of how much an instrument typically moves over a given period, including gaps between one bar's close and the next one's open. It describes volatility, not direction.
In SwipeTA：Used as a filter: a setup only becomes a question if the move over the horizon is between one and three times the 14-bar ATR at the decision point.
The tendency of price to move back toward a recent average after moving away from it. On short intraday timeframes a substantial part of what looks like a move is an overshoot being absorbed.
In SwipeTA：The property behind the naive 'fade the last candle' rule, which answers about 60% of our candidate questions correctly — and is still a bad rule to learn.
The high and low established during the first minutes of a session, commonly the first 15 or 30. Traders use it as a reference for whether the session is breaking out of, or holding inside, its early boundaries.
In SwipeTA：Computed from the first 30 minutes and shown as context on the chart, which is also why questions never start before it has formed.
Also: bar replay, market replay
Practising on historical data by hiding everything after a chosen moment and revealing it one bar at a time. It removes hindsight in a way that scrolling back through a completed chart cannot.
In SwipeTA：SwipeTA is a compressed form of this: instead of managing a trade bar by bar, you make one call and the horizon plays forward immediately.
Also: demo account, simulated trading
Placing simulated orders in a live or delayed market, with a simulated portfolio, to practise the mechanics of trading without money at risk. It exercises execution, position management and record-keeping.
In SwipeTA：Not what SwipeTA is. There is no order ticket, no portfolio and no broker connection — the subject being practised is reading the chart, not operating a platform.
Running a defined set of rules over historical data to see how it would have performed. It tests a strategy, mechanically and at scale, rather than a person's judgement.
In SwipeTA：Also not what SwipeTA is. A backtest measures a rule; SwipeTA measures the reader — which is why its questions are chosen to be hard for simple rules to answer.
How these apply to the way questions are actually built and judged is on the methodology page. Longer pieces are in Learn.