Disclaimer: CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage.
You should consider whether you understand how CFDs work and whether you can afford to take the high risk of losing your money.
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DAO
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is an entity that operates on a blockchain through smart contracts as opposed to a traditional management structure and legal system.
The concept is that the rules governing the organization are hard-coded into software: decisions are made through token-holder votes, funds are managed by the protocol rather than by any individual, and no single individual or company is technically in control.
In principle, it eliminates the need to trust a central authority. Practically, DAOs differ in size by an order of magnitude. Some are actually decentralized and functional, others are decentralized in name only, and an order of magnitude larger are those governed by token voting.
In most jurisdictions, the legal status of DAOs remains unresolved, posing real problems of liability and enforceability.
Example: Cryptocurrency investors come together in a DAO to collect capital and make a joint bid on assets. Governance tokens are minted, proposals are made on-chain, and members vote on the best way to deploy the treasury.
When a vulnerability in a smart contract is later exploited, and the money drained, it turns out that the question of who is legally responsible and who, should a vulnerability be exploited, can be sued, turns out to have no easy answer.
DApp
DApp is short for decentralised application. It is a software that does not run on servers owned by a single corporation.
Instead of a firm owning the underlying infrastructure and being free to change it, censor it or even shut it down, the logic of a DApp is executed by smart contracts on a public blockchain.
Once launched, it runs according to the code and no party can turn it off or change its behaviour unilaterally. Today, most DApps are based on Ethereum or other smart contract platforms. These include decentralised exchanges and lending systems, games and digital art marketplaces.
Historically, the UX has been heavy-handed compared to standard applications – wallet connections, gas fees, transaction confirmation all create complexity that would be off-putting to most mainstream consumers.
But the underlying suggestion is real: an app that no single corporation owns, and that can’t be easily shut down by a regulator, is a structurally distinct thing.
Example: A user in a country with capital controls wants to convert 1 crypto for another without going through an exchange that might be prohibited or require identification verification. Their strategy is to connect a self-custody wallet to a decentralized exchange (DApp) and do the swap directly on-chain, without intermediaries and without needing an account.
Dark cloud cover
Dark cloud cover is a two-candle bearish reversal pattern in technical analysis. It is most significant when observed after a prolonged uptrend. The first candle is a high-quality bullish candle that closes near the high and supports the overall upward trend.
The second candle opens higher than that close – gapping up, which looks initially as a continuation – but then sells off throughout the session and closes below the middle of the body of the first candle.
That reversal, from a bullish gap open to a close deep in the prior candle’s range, gives the pattern its name and its meaning. It indicates that buyers drove up prices at the open but were unable to sustain the gains, while sellers dominated the session.
The further the second candle is inside the first, the stronger the signal will be. It must be taken in context, not in isolation, as with all candlestick patterns.
Example: A stock has been on an upward trend over the last six weeks. It has a powerful close on Monday. On Tuesday, the gap-up at the open is due to optimistic traders piling in, but by the close, it gives back almost all those gains and sits well below Monday’s midpoint. A technical trader looking at that daily chart sees a dark cloud cover forming and takes it as a warning that the uptrend may be losing pace.
Dark pool
Dark pools are private venues for trading where large orders can be executed away from the public eye. Dark pools do not display any pre-trade information, unlike a conventional stock market, where bids and offers are open to everybody. The order book is hidden, and that’s the idea.
These were mostly for institutional investors – pension funds, asset managers, big banks – that need to purchase or sell enormous numbers of shares without alerting the rest of the market.
If a fund has to sell five million shares in one firm, it’s likely that if they did it openly on an exchange, they would influence the price against them before they completed the sale. They can work the sequence in a quiet, dark pool. Dark pools have had a fraught relationship with regulators for years.
That same opaqueness that makes them beneficial to institutions also makes them harder to oversee, and there have been significant incidents of operators abusing the information they contain.
Example: A significant pension fund is looking to sell a large interest in an FTSE 100 company. Rather than overwhelming the exchange with sell orders and watching the price plunge in real time, it goes through a dark pool, finds a willing buyer on the other side, and completes the deal without the broader market ever seeing it coming.
Dash (DASH)
Dash is a cryptocurrency that is specifically made to be anonymous and provide quick payments. It was initially known as Darkcoin in 2014 and later renamed to Dash – short name: digital cash. Its initial objective was to overcome two convenient drawbacks of Bitcoin, the creators found: the speed of transactions and financial privacy.
Dash created PrivateSend, which mixes transactions to obscure their origin, and InstantSend, where transactions are combined to obscure their origin, and payments are confirmed almost instantly instead of waiting until multiple block confirmations are received. It was also the first to introduce a two-level network structure, which operates on masternodes; nodes that are holding a significant amount of Dash as collateral, and in return provide the network with advanced functionality, whilst sharing block rewards.
Once one of the biggest cryptocurrencies by market cap, Dash was especially popular in such countries where the currency was unstable. It has since lost some of its relevance in the context of the wider crypto market, but still has a following of devoted users based on its payments-focused offering.
Example: A customer in a nation where the domestic currency is losing its value rapidly makes a payment to a supplier in a different country, using Dash. The payment is made in seconds, the price is low, and neither of the parties needs a bank account or a currency conversion service to get it done.
DAX
DAX is the German flagship stock market index, which tracks the 40 largest companies listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. It is like the FTSE 100 of the UK or the S&P 500 of the US; it is the number that people go to when they want to take a quick read on the performance of German equities.
The industry, chemicals, automobiles, and financials comprise a major portion of the index, which reflects the structure of the German economy itself. Such names as Volkswagen, Siemens, BASF, and Deutsche Bank sit within it.
As the largest economy in Europe, with a strong export base to countries such as China and the United States, the DAX is vulnerable to the global trading environment, energy prices, and the well-being of major export markets. It is a total return index, meaning dividends are reinvested in the calculation, making direct comparisons with price-only indices, such as the Dow Jones, slightly misleading.
Example: In 2018, when trade tensions between the US and China spiked, the DAX sold off more violently than most other leading indices. German companies that were highly exposed to Chinese demand felt the heat first, and the DAX was quick and clear in reflecting that vulnerability.
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