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.
Web Trader MT5
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Debt security
A financial instrument that represents a company or government’s debt, such as a bond or note.
Debt-to-equity ratio
A financial ratio that measures a company’s debt relative to its equity.
Debt-to-GDP ratio
The debt to GDP ratio is a measure of a country’s total debt compared to its economic production (GDP) over a year. It is one of the most popular markers of a country’s financial health. The logic is clear enough. A huge economy can easily support more debt than a tiny economy. Looking at debt, in isolation, doesn’t tell you anything about a country.
It gives you a sense of size in terms of GDP, how big the debt burden is relative to the ability of the country to generate income and finally repay. A rising ratio could be a sign that a government is borrowing faster than its economy is growing, leading to questions of sustainability in the long run.
A declining ratio can imply that the economy is growing out of its debt or that the government is running surpluses. A high or low ratio is not necessarily good or bad. It depends on the circumstances, interest rates and currency of denomination.
Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio has been well above 200% for years now, which, by traditional measures, seems alarming. Nonetheless, it has been able to borrow at very cheap rates, because most of its debt is held domestically and is denominated in the yen, which it controls. The ratio alone does not reveal the whole story.
Decentralized
Decentralized is any system, network, or structure in which control and decision-making are distributed among many actors instead of a single actor. In conventional finance, the banks, exchanges, and regulators sit at the center. They are the custodians of the records, the enforcers of the rules, and they can freeze, reverse, or block transactions.
A decentralized system eliminates that central place of control. No single entity owns the ledger, nor is it authorized to approve transactions or even to close things down.
Decentralization is the ethos of blockchain and crypto. A distributed network of nodes authenticates the transactions, records are publicly shared, and no government or corporation can make a unilateral change.
Ideally, decentralization lies on a spectrum. There are systems more and less decentralized than others, and true decentralization is more difficult to achieve than it might seem. Power tends to concentrate over time, even in systems designed to prevent it.
Example: Bitcoin is regarded as being highly decentralized since no single company, government, or individual is in charge of its network. There are thousands of nodes worldwide that independently validate transactions. Compare that to a stablecoin run by one company with the ability to freeze wallets; technically, it is a blockchain, but centralized in the ways that matter the most.
Defend a level
Defend a level refers to when a large player, a central bank, a major institution, or sometimes a loose group of traders, recursively interferes with a particular price in order to prevent it from being violated. The level in question might be a round number with psychological significance, a key technical level that many people are watching, or an exchange rate that a government or central bank has decided it does not want to see broken.
The defense mechanism comprises either absorbing selling pressure (assuming that the level is support) or selling into buying pressure (assuming that the level is resistance).
It may be maintained for a long time, but it tends to cause tension: the more aggressively any level is defended, the bigger the move will be when it finally causes the level to be overrun.
Example: It took years for the Swiss National Bank to allow the EUR/CHF floor to drop to 1.20 before it began intervening whenever the franc seemed to be strengthening along those lines. It was maintained, until in January 2015, the SNB suddenly and without warning forfeited the defense.
The franc shot up almost 30 percent within a few minutes. A number of brokers became bankrupt. It was a good wake-up call that defended levels of work right until the point that they no longer do so.
DeFi
DeFi is short for Decentralized Finance, and it refers to financial services and products built on decentralized blockchain networks, without relying on traditional financial institutions such as banks, brokers, and exchanges.
It’s a concept of replicating basic financial activities like loans, borrowing, trading, and interest-earning using smart contracts that can be automatically executed on a public blockchain.
No loan officer is signing this new loan application, no broker is signing this new trade, and no bank is holding your deposit. The code does it all!
DeFi experienced tremendous popularity between 2020 and 2022, as billions were invested in lending protocols, decentralized exchanges, and yield farming strategies, among others. It’s also been targeted by hackers, with smart contract exploits resulting in billions of dollars in losses across the industry.
DeFi regulatory status remains highly unsettled, and consumer protection, money laundering, and systemic risk have become concerns for authorities worldwide.
Example: A user wants to gain interest on their crypto assets without moving them to a centralized exchange. They deposited tokens into a DeFi lending protocol that will automatically lend those funds to the borrower, and the interest earned on that loan will be sent to the borrower without any company involved and no application for an account required, and all controlled by a smart contract.
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