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
D
Digital Signature
A digital signature is a cryptographic method used to verify the authenticity and integrity of a message or digital document. It’s the electronic equivalent of a handwritten signature, but harder to forge. Digital signatures form the basis of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
When a user makes a transaction, like sending bitcoin, they sign the transaction with their private key. Any network member can then use the public key associated with that signature to verify that it is legitimate and that the transaction has not been altered in transit.
The private key is kept private, but the public key is accessible to all. The math ensures that a valid signature could only have been generated by the owner of the private key, but reveals nothing about the key itself.
That’s how a trustless network can establish ownership and enable transactions without a central authority.
Example: A user wants to send cryptocurrency to another wallet. Their program then uses their private key to generate a digital signature unique to that transaction. Nodes throughout the network verify the signature (with the public key), verify that the user has enough funds, and record the transaction on the blockchain.
No one ever sees the private key, and no one has to trust a central authority to confirm the transfer.
Dilution
The reduction in a shareholder’s percentage of ownership in a company due to the issuance of new shares.
Dip
A dip is a short-term drop in the price of an asset in a long-term uptrend. This is not a reversal. It’s a transient dip – a halt or minor correction before the prevailing trend continues.
“Buy the dip” is one of the most frequently repeated pieces of advice in retail investing, based on the premise that a temporary price drop in an otherwise sound asset offers a buying opportunity. The theory works if the underlying trend is indeed intact and the pullback is a function of short-term circumstances, not a fundamental decline in the asset’s prospects.
The problem is that not every dip is a dip. Sometimes what looks like a momentary pullback is the beginning of a prolonged downturn, and buyers who go in expecting a bounce find themselves catching a falling knife. Separating the two in real time is harder than it looks.
Example: A technology stock has been climbing consistently for months. The stock drops 7% over three days as a wider market selloff on interest rate fears takes hold. The company’s fundamentals have not changed. Investors who see it as a dip and add to their position at reduced prices are rewarded as the stock recovers and continues its rise within 2 weeks.
Direct market access (DMA)
A trading system that lets traders access financial markets directly, providing real-time data and flexibility.
Direct Market Access (DMA)
DMA or Direct Market Access is a service that enables traders to place orders directly into the order book of the exchange and avoid the traditional broker who would execute deals on their behalf. DMA enables the trader to interact with the market in real time, seeing live bids and offers and determining precisely where in the order book to place an order and supervising the execution themselves. This gives you far more transparency and precision than if you were using a broker that deals in-house or routes your orders as it sees fit.
For institutional traders and sophisticated retail investors, execution quality and speed are crucial, and DMA is highly appreciated. In general, this also leads to tighter effective spreads because orders do not interact through the intermediary’s internal pricing, but directly with each other.
But due to technology infrastructure and legal constraints, DMA is often offered through a broker’s systems and not as a stand-alone service.
Example: A proprietary trading company uses DMA to buy or sell a large stock order in a volatile market. Their traders put the order straight onto the exchange order book, instead of handing it to a broker and hoping for the best execution. They control the time and size of each slice individually to minimize market effect and get the best possible pricing.
Direct Price Stream
A direct price stream is a live, continuous feed of bid and offer prices provided directly by a liquidity provider or market maker to a client, without passing through a third-party aggregator or intermediary pricing layer.
In foreign exchange markets in particular, the quality of a price stream matters enormously. A direct stream tends to offer tighter spreads and faster updates because it reflects the liquidity provider’s actual positions and appetite in real time.
By contrast, a price that has been through an aggregator or re-priced by an intermediary may be slightly wider or slower to update. Banks and prime brokers typically offer direct price streams to institutional clients as part of a broader relationship, with the quality of the stream reflecting the size and importance of that client’s flow.
For high-frequency and algorithmic traders, even millisecond differences in price feed latency can meaningfully affect execution quality.
Example: A currency hedge fund receives a direct price stream from three of its relationship banks simultaneously. Rather than relying on a single source, its execution system compares the streams in real time and routes each order to whichever bank is showing the best price at that moment; a process that happens automatically and in fractions of a second.
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