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Crypto Copy Trading Glossary
Every term you need to understand copy trading, leverage and crypto perpetuals — explained in plain English. New to trading? Start with Education, try the profit calculator, or start free.
Copy trading
- Copy trading
- Automatically mirroring another trader's positions in your own account, so when they trade, you trade — at your own size.
- Social trading
- Following, discussing and copying other traders on a shared platform, turning trading into a community activity.
- Mimic
- A one-off copy of a specific trade — you open the same position at the current market price without committing to auto-copy.
- Auto-copy
- A setting that automatically opens every new trade a trader makes, sized and leverage-capped to your own limits.
- Copier
- A user who copies another trader's positions. On PurffleTrade, the traders they copy can earn a share of the profit.
- Creator rewards
- The share of profit a trader earns when their copiers make money — the incentive to post genuinely good trades.
- Verified trader
- A trader whose win rate and results are confirmed from real, on-chain activity rather than self-reported numbers.
Trading basics
- Long
- A position that profits when the price goes up. You 'go long' when you expect an asset to rise.
- Short
- A position that profits when the price goes down. Shorting lets you make money in a falling market.
- Perpetual futures (perps)
- Derivatives that track an asset's price with no expiry date, letting you trade long or short with leverage indefinitely.
- Position
- An open trade — long or short — on a particular market, with a size, entry price and leverage.
- Entry price
- The price at which your position was opened. Your profit or loss is measured from this price.
- Mark price
- The current live reference price used to value your position and calculate unrealized P&L.
- Order
- An instruction to buy or sell. A market order fills immediately at the best price; a limit order fills only at a set price.
- Notional
- The full value of a position (size × price) — as opposed to the smaller margin you actually put up.
Risk & leverage
- Leverage
- Borrowed exposure that multiplies both gains and losses. 10x leverage means a 1% price move is a 10% move on your margin.
- Margin
- The collateral you put up to open a leveraged position. Higher leverage uses less margin but liquidates faster.
- Liquidation
- Forced closure of a leveraged position when losses eat through your margin. You lose the margin backing that position.
- Liquidation price
- The price at which your position would be liquidated. Longs liquidate as price falls; shorts as it rises.
- Take-profit (TP)
- An order that automatically closes your position at a target price to lock in a gain.
- Stop-loss (SL)
- An order that automatically closes your position at a set price to cap a loss.
- Drawdown
- The drop from a peak in your account value — a measure of how much you've lost from your high point.
- Win rate
- The percentage of closed trades that were profitable. A high win rate with poor risk control can still lose money.
- P&L
- Profit and loss. Realized P&L is locked in on closed trades; unrealized P&L is the paper gain/loss on open ones.
- ROI
- Return on investment — your profit as a percentage of the margin you risked.
- Volatility
- How sharply and quickly a price moves. Higher volatility means bigger opportunities and bigger risk.
Wallets & custody
- Non-custodial
- You hold your own funds — the platform never controls them. Only your wallet can withdraw. PurffleTrade is non-custodial.
- Custodial
- A service holds your funds for you. Convenient, but you're trusting them not to lose or freeze your money.
- Wallet
- Software that holds the keys to your on-chain funds and signs transactions. Can be built-in or external (e.g. MetaMask).
- Private key
- The secret that controls a wallet. Anyone with it controls the funds — never share it.
- Agent key
- A trade-only key that can place orders but can never withdraw — how PurffleTrade trades on your behalf safely.
- Seed phrase
- A list of words that can restore a wallet. Whoever has it controls the wallet, so store it offline and private.
Fees & mechanics
- USDC
- A US-dollar stablecoin used to fund trading. $1 USDC ≈ $1, so your balance doesn't swing with crypto prices.
- Arbitrum
- A fast, low-cost Ethereum layer-2 network. USDC on Arbitrum is used to fund your trading wallet.
- Gas fee
- A small network fee paid to process an on-chain transaction (like a deposit). Not a platform fee.
- Funding rate
- Periodic payments between longs and shorts in perpetual futures that keep the perp price tied to the spot price.
- Slippage
- The difference between the price you expect and the price you actually get, common in fast or thin markets.
- On-chain
- Recorded on a public blockchain — verifiable by anyone. On-chain results can't be faked, unlike self-reported stats.
- Platform fee
- A charge some apps add on top of trading. PurffleTrade charges $0 platform fees — you only pay standard network trading fees.
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