OriginaveGlossary
Every word this site uses, explained like you'd explain it to a friend at a barbecue. No finance degree needed.
ETF
Exchange-Traded Fund. A big basket holding hundreds of companies, sold as one single thing you can buy in seconds. Instead of betting on one horse, you buy a tiny piece of the whole race.
Index
A list of companies with strict membership rules — basically a VIP club. The S&P 500 is the 500 biggest US companies. An index fund photocopies the list and simply buys everything on it. No genius required, which is the whole point.
Ticker
The short nickname a fund trades under — SPY, QQQ, VT. License plates, but for money.
Trading day
A day the stock market is actually open. Weekends and holidays don't count, so a year has only about 250 of them. Yes — the market gets more days off than you do.
Big day (±1%)
Our name for a day when the price closes 1% or more away from yesterday — up or down. In a boring year they're rare treats; in 2008 they were practically the daily schedule.
Calm day
A day that stays within ±1%. The market's version of "nothing much happened today, honey." Most days are like this — that's the big gray part of our bars.
Green day / red day
Green day: closed higher than yesterday. Red day: closed lower. Even fantastic years are roughly 45% red — the secret is that the green days tend to be a little bigger.
Winning / losing streak
How many green (or red) days in a row the fund managed. Fun trivia, terrible investment strategy — streaks tell you where the market has been, never where it's going.
Volatility (choppiness)
The official number for how shaky the ride is. We do the math and translate it into Calm, Normal, Choppy or Wild — because "annualized volatility of 23.6%" never helped anyone sleep.
Dividend
A cash thank-you some funds pay out a few times a year, like a tiny salary for owning them. All our numbers assume you immediately reinvest it — buying more with it instead of buying pizza.
Lump sum
Investing all your money at once, on day one. Terrifying for your stomach, but historically it wins more often than not — the market spends more time going up than down.
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA)
Dollar-cost averaging: splitting your money into equal monthly bites — with $10,000 that's about $833 a month. You automatically buy more shares when prices are low and fewer when they're high. Comfort food for nervous investors.
Factor investing
Most index funds buy the whole haystack. Factor investing says some straws behave differently — the cheap ones, the trendy ones, the high-quality ones — and tilts your money toward one of them. Backed by decades of research; patience sold separately.
Value (the factor)
The oldest factor: buy companies that look cheap compared to what they actually earn and own — the market's bargain bin — then wait for everyone else to notice. Fewer fireworks than tech stocks, but in crashes the boring bin usually falls less. On this site, VTV is our resident bargain hunter.
Growth (the factor)
Value's flashy sibling: buy the companies growing the fastest — usually tech — and pay a premium for the privilege. Feels amazing in bull markets, stings first when the party ends. VUG is our resident optimist.
Momentum (the factor)
Buy what has been going up, avoid what has been going down — investing's version of the hot hand. Sounds naive; decades of data say it works more often than it should. Just don't ask it to explain itself at turning points. MTUM is our resident trend-follower.
Quality (the factor)
Companies with tidy balance sheets: solid profits, steady earnings, little debt. The boring friend who always has savings and never misses rent. It rarely wins the year, but it also rarely ruins it. SPHQ is our resident adult in the room.
Best day / worst day
The single day of the year with the biggest jump or the biggest drop — shown as what it would have done to $10,000 of your money. Spoiler: the worst days and the best days like to live in the same neighborhood.
TER (Total Expense Ratio)
Total Expense Ratio: the yearly running cost of a fund, quietly deducted from its returns — you never get a bill, the price just grows that much slower. SXR8 charges 0.07% a year, VWCE 0.19%. Small numbers, but they compound just like returns do.
Accumulating vs distributing
An accumulating ETF reinvests its dividends inside the fund — they show up as a higher share price, never as cash. A distributing ETF pays them out to your account instead. Same investments, different plumbing; taxes are usually what decides which one suits you. VWCE accumulates, VGWD distributes.
UCITS
The EU rulebook a fund must follow to be sold to European retail investors — think of it as a safety certification, not an investment style. It's why Europeans buy VWCE or SXR8 on Xetra instead of the American VOO or SPY: US funds don't carry the label, so EU brokers can't sell them.
Currency effect (USD vs EUR)
Why your world ETF and its fact sheet disagree: the fund earns returns in dollars, but you live in euros. In 2025 a world tracker rose about 23% in dollars yet only about 9% in euros, because the euro gained roughly 13% against the dollar. Every euro figure on this site is the return you actually experienced on Xetra.
Total return vs price return
Price return counts only the share price; total return also counts the dividends the fund paid — which is the number that matters, since you actually receive them. Every chart on this site uses total return with dividends reinvested, so nothing is quietly missing.