Every term you'll see in the dashboard, explained plainly. No assumed knowledge.
This is the short-horizon view. When a level says "1M Buy Zone," it means the setup looks interesting if you're planning to be in and out within weeks to a couple of months. The trade levels are tighter: the stop isn't far below entry, and the targets are closer too.
A tighter setup means quicker resolution either way. You don't need the market to cooperate for six months. But you also have less room for noise before the stop triggers.
The long-horizon column — and it's not a trade call. It shows a DCA pace label (Accumulate / Normal / Ease) set by how deep the asset sits in its own drawdown history: unusually far below its highs means buy faster, near its highs means ease off.
The label paces long-term accumulation; it has no targets or stop and never tells you to sell. Only the 1M horizon carries trade levels.
The price range where the math of the trade starts to make sense. Defined by a Buy Low and a Buy High — a volatility-sized band around the 50-day average, recomputed every morning from price structure so it can't go stale. When price is in this band, the distance to the stop is manageable relative to the potential upside at TP1 and TP2.
Being in the buy zone is not a signal that price will go up. It just means you're entering at a place where if it does go up, you make a decent multiple of what you'd lose if it goes against you. The setup can still fail.
The first upside target. When price reaches TP1, a lot of traders sell half the position and let the rest ride. This is worth doing: it locks in real profit and makes the remaining position psychologically much easier to hold, since the worst case now is breaking even (or a small gain) on the overall trade.
On this dashboard, TP1 is computed fresh each morning: it sits at the nearest weekly swing high above the buy zone — the most recent level where sellers actually showed up — with a 2:1 reward-to-risk projection as the fallback when price is already at its highs. See How TP1 and TP2 Are Set for the full recipe.
The second and final target. If TP1 is hit and the setup continues playing out, this is where most traders take the rest off the table. Occasionally you might run a small portion past TP2 if there's strong momentum, but for most purposes TP2 is the exit.
TP2 sits one measured move beyond TP1 — the same distance again that price travelled from the top of the buy zone to TP1. See How TP1 and TP2 Are Set for how both targets get computed and refreshed.
The level where the trade idea stops working. If price falls to the stop, the setup has failed, and you take the loss. Small, planned losses are what let you stay in the game long enough for the winners to add up.
The stop is set before entering the trade, not after. And once TP1 is hit, the stop moves to your entry price so you're no longer risking original capital on the remaining half.
The ratio of potential gain (entry to TP1) versus potential loss (entry to stop). A 2.5:1 R:R means for every dollar you risk, you're targeting $2.50 of gain.
Generally, setups below 1.5:1 aren't worth taking. The pill turns green at 2:1 or better.
A 1–10 score, computed mechanically alongside the verdict, for how many independent factors back the call: trend quality, entry quality (depth of the pullback, or a fresh breakout), and reward-to-risk. Guards cap it — a falling knife or a thin R:R keeps the score down no matter how good the level looks.
A score of 8 or higher means multiple independent signals are pointing the same direction. A 4 or below means the price level is there, but not much else is backing it up.
A simplified directional call for the 1M horizon, computed mechanically each morning from trend, zone location, market regime, and risk guards (earnings within 14 days, a hard negative shift in analyst revisions, falling-knife and overbought vetoes). The AI layer may only downgrade a verdict for a nameable news risk — never upgrade one. Three states:
A short note that appears on the dashboard on eventful days — a market-regime flip, fresh Sell signals, or a cluster of mechanical changes — written by a deeper review model that re-examines the day's signals, vetoes, and conflicts. It's commentary only; it never changes the signals themselves.
Each traded asset card shows a label for the 1M horizon (the 12M column is a DCA pace label — see 12M above). Here's what they mean:
The dashboard groups assets into three tiers so you can scan the most urgent things first.
Occasionally the daily scan turns up a Shariah-compliant name that isn't on the main watchlist but looks undervalued based on current price and fundamentals. When that happens, it gets flagged here with a brief note.
These are not formal trade setups with defined levels. Think of them as "worth a closer look" callouts. The diamond badge just means the asset has been screened for Shariah compliance at time of writing. Always verify independently for your own situation.
The verdict chip at the top of each Halal Value Spotlight and Analyst Radar pick. It is a value call — is the discount to fair value real and the business thesis intact — not the mechanical 1M Buy/Hold/Sell verdict on the main watchlist cards, which is computed daily from trend, zone location, and risk guards. Value Buy means the mispricing looks genuine; Watch means it's cheap but something must confirm first (most often a downtrend that needs to reverse — the falling-knife rule applies here too); Avoid means the cheapness is deserved.
General vocabulary used across the site. Nothing here is specific to one page.
A bull market is a sustained rise; the common shorthand is a gain of 20% or more off a low. A bear market is a fall of 20% or more from a peak, usually with the mood to match.
Both labels are backward-looking. Nobody rings a bell at the turn, which is why this site uses the mechanical market regime filter instead of trying to call tops and bottoms.
A single mechanical switch: when SPUS trades above its own 200-day average the regime is risk-on; below it, risk-off. The banner at the top of the Portfolio page shows the current state.
It feeds the daily verdicts, and several strategy sleeves move partly or fully to cash when it flips. Deliberately blunt: slow to react, but it never needs anyone's opinion.
How far price has fallen from its most recent peak, in percent. An asset at $80 that touched $100 is in a 20% drawdown, even if it's up on the year.
The Portfolio page also shows depth vs own history: today's drawdown ranked against every drawdown that asset has had over the past two years. A reading of 82% means today's dip is deeper than 82% of that history — unusually deep for this asset — which is what pushes the DCA pace label toward Accumulate.
How much an asset's price swings day to day, in either direction. High volatility isn't the same as falling; it just means bigger moves.
ATR (Average True Range) is the practical measure used here: the average size of a daily move. Buy zones and stops are sized in ATR, so choppier assets get wider levels instead of constant false alarms.
The well-documented tendency of assets that did well over the past 3–12 months to keep doing well for a while. It's one of the most persistent effects in market history, though it reverses hard at turning points.
It shows up here in two forms: ranking names against each other (see Relative Strength) and comparing an asset to its own past (see TSMOM).
Spreading money across assets that don't all move together, so no single failure sinks the portfolio. Done right, it cuts the swings more than it cuts the returns.
What counts is correlation, not the number of tickers. Twelve tech stocks is one bet wearing twelve names — see Portfolio Heat for how the site checks this.
Periodically resetting positions back to their target weights: trimming what has grown, topping up what has shrunk. It forces a small amount of sell-high, buy-low without requiring a forecast.
The strategy sleeves rebalance on a schedule (monthly or quarterly), not by feel. An exit booked at a scheduled rebalance shows up in the ledger as "Reweight" or "Rank exit," not as a judgement that the trade failed.
Giving every position the same dollar amount instead of weighting by conviction or company size. The Momentum sleeve fills its slots equal-weight, and the per-signal performance tables use a flat $1,000-per-trade convention so different strategies can be compared on the same footing.
Dollar-cost averaging means investing a fixed amount on a fixed schedule, regardless of price. A lump sum means investing everything at once.
Historically the lump sum wins slightly more often (the money is in the market earlier), but DCA is far easier to stick with, and an abandoned plan returns nothing. The 12M pace label exists to fine-tune DCA, not replace it.
Deciding how much money goes into a trade. It matters more than entry timing: sizing is usually the difference between a survivable loss and a damaging one.
A common rule is to size so that hitting your stop costs a fixed small slice of the account, say 1–2%. The Strategies page has the worked version.
The dashboard's stop is a level evaluated on settled closes: the setup fails when a session closes through it, not when an intraday wick touches it.
A stop order at your broker is different. It triggers the moment the price prints, so it will sell you out on wicks the dashboard would have ignored. Know which one you're using before you place it.
The official end-of-session price: the prior day's close for stocks, ETFs and commodities, and the prior UTC daily close for crypto. The live price you see during the day is just the latest tick.
Every signal entry, exit and performance number on this site is booked on settled closes, because the live tick flatters results and can't be reproduced tomorrow.
The gap between the price a model assumes and the price you actually get after spreads and order handling. Small per trade, large over many trades.
The performance numbers here apply a slippage haircut to every closed trade: roughly 0.5% for crypto and 0.1% for stocks and ETFs. That keeps a paper "+0.1% win" from being counted as a win when it would really be a wash.
How easily an asset can be bought or sold without moving its price. Thin, low-volume names have wide bid/ask spreads, so real-world slippage is worse than the fixed haircut assumes.
One practical consequence: the small, fast movers that top the swing list cost more to trade than their headline returns suggest.
The yardstick a strategy has to beat to justify its extra effort and risk. If it can't beat the benchmark, you were better off just buying the benchmark.
This site's benchmark is SPUS, the Shariah-screened S&P 500 ETF. Relative strength is measured against it, the PEAD lab is graded against it, and the swing sleeve's kill test is "beat holding SPUS or be shut down."
The annual fee a fund charges, taken out of its price rather than billed to you. An expense ratio of 0.45% costs $4.50 a year per $1,000 invested.
It compounds against you for as long as you hold, which makes it one of the few numbers worth being genuinely fussy about when choosing between similar ETFs.
The Shariah-compliant alternative to bonds. Instead of lending money at interest, sukuk holders own a share of a real asset or venture and receive a slice of its income.
In a portfolio they play the role bonds do in conventional investing: steady income, low volatility, ballast in equity selloffs. On this site that exposure comes through SPSK. More detail on the Halal Investing page.
The vocabulary behind the Swing Setups page. These are technical terms — they read price and momentum, not company fundamentals. For the full method and how it stacks up against championship traders, see the Swing Strategy PDF.
Holding a position for days to a few weeks to capture one defined price move, then getting out. It sits between day trading (minutes to hours) and long-term investing (years). The Swing Setups page scores how strongly each ticker matches a good swing entry right now — it doesn't predict, it measures alignment.
Technical analysis reads price, volume, and momentum to decide when to enter. Fundamental analysis reads the business — revenue, debt, valuation, and for us Shariah screening — to decide what to own. The swing signals are purely technical; they assume you've already decided the asset is worth owning.
A moving average smooths choppy daily prices into one trend line. The "exponential" version (EMA) weights recent days more heavily so it reacts faster. The 50-day EMA tracks the medium-term trend; the 200-day EMA tracks the long-term trend. In an uptrend, price tends to dip to these lines and bounce — they act as moving support.
When the 50-day EMA crosses above the 200-day EMA, it's a golden cross — the medium-term trend has turned up. The reverse (50 below 200) is a death cross, a caution flag. The page's "Uptrend" signal is stricter than a plain golden cross: it also requires the 200-day line to be rising, so you're trading with a trend that's improving, not just barely positive.
A momentum gauge from 0 to 100 measuring how strong recent gains are versus recent losses. Above 70 is "overbought" (run up fast, risky to chase); below 30 is classically "oversold." In an uptrend RSI rarely falls below 40, so a reading under 48 marks a healthy pullback to buy into rather than a collapse to avoid.
Whether a ticker is outperforming the broad market (we benchmark against the SPUS S&P 500 ETF) over the last 3 months. A name beating the index on the way up tends to keep leading — it's the single filter top swing traders rely on most. The setup card shows the margin, e.g. "+8.9% vs S&P."
Don't confuse the two: RSI (Relative Strength Index) compares a stock to its own recent past — a momentum oscillator. Relative Strength compares a stock to the rest of the market — a leadership ranking. Same two words, completely different ideas, and both appear on the swing page.
"Moving Average Convergence Divergence" — it tracks the gap between a fast and a slow moving average to show whether momentum is building or fading. The histogram is the bar chart underneath it. When the histogram rises for a couple of bars out of negative territory, momentum is flipping from down to up — that's the "MACD improving" signal.
When price grinds to a lower low but the momentum oscillator (RSI or MACD) makes a higher low, the selling is losing force even as price drifts down — often an early hint of a bottom. On the swing page a ⚡ marks names with a fresh, confirmed bullish divergence (the pivots are locked in, and price hasn't already run away from the low). It's context only — it doesn't change the score, and divergences fail often, so treat the ⚡ as a prompt to look closer, never a buy on its own.
Two bands drawn above and below a 20-day average; they widen when price is volatile and tighten when it's calm. %B tells you where price sits within them: 100 = riding the top band, 0 = at the bottom. Above 85 means price is stretched to the top of its range — the page vetoes those as overbought, no matter how many other signals fire.
How many shares (or coins) changed hands. A pullback on light, drying-up volume is healthy — sellers are exhausted. A bounce on heavy volume confirms buyers are stepping in. A drop on heavy volume, by contrast, is distribution: a warning. The "Volume" signal checks for the healthy versions of these.
Overbought means price has run up fast and far (RSI > 70, or hugging the top Bollinger band) — prone to a pullback and a poor place to start a new long. Oversold is the opposite extreme. Both are warnings about being stretched, not precise timing tools.
A ticker dropping so hard and fast (RSI under 25) that trying to "catch" it is dangerous — it's usually still falling. The page vetoes these even though they read as deeply oversold, because the eventual bounce pays off but the timing is brutal. Better to wait for a base to form.
A temporary dip within an ongoing uptrend — a pause, not a reversal. Buying a pullback (near support, trend still intact) is the core swing setup. It's the disciplined alternative to chasing a breakout after price has already run.
A context flag on each setup card. It means the most recent close was up AND reclaimed the 50-day EMA — the bounce has actually started, not just lined up. "Awaiting confirmation" means the setup is primed but hasn't triggered yet; the disciplined move is to wait for that green confirmation candle before entering.
Support is a price area where buyers have repeatedly stepped in — a floor. Resistance is where sellers have — a ceiling. Moving averages like the EMA50 often act as moving support in an uptrend. Targets (TP1/TP2) are usually set at resistance levels; stops just below support.
Each ticker is scored on six technical signals — Uptrend, RSI pullback, EMA50 support, MACD improving, Volume, and Relative strength — one point each. A ticker surfaces as a candidate when it fires at least 60% of its available signals (and isn't vetoed for being overbought or a falling knife). A higher score isn't a guarantee; it just means more independent signals are pointing the same way.
The vocabulary behind the Portfolio page and the performance tables: how the model account is run, and how finished trades get labelled.
One self-contained strategy running inside the shared model account, with its own rules, its own slice of capital, and its own rebalance schedule. There are six: Core DCA (45%), All-Weather (20%), Quality (15%), Momentum (10%), Trend (5%) and Swing (5%).
Sleeves don't share opinions. Each trades its own mechanical rules, and none of them follow the dashboard's daily Buy/Hold/Sell verdicts.
A backtest replays a strategy against past data — easy to flatter, even by accident. A forward test runs the strategy on live prices and lets the results pile up in real time. Every sleeve here has been paper-traded that way since May 2026; none of them gets to claim a track record it didn't earn day by day.
"Funded" means positions are sized in real dollars from a model account ($30,000 to start, plus $1,000 added each month), not just listed as ideas. No real money is at stake yet.
The single shared record that every sleeve's entries and exits resolve through. The dashboard, the swing page, the portfolio page and the P&L reports all read the same ledger, so they can't disagree about what happened to the same trade.
Weighting holdings by risk instead of by dollars: each asset gets a weight inversely proportional to its recent volatility, so a calm asset like sukuk takes a big weight and a wild one like Bitcoin takes a small one.
The All-Weather sleeve works this way, with a 20% floor on the equity leg and a 10% cap on Bitcoin. Sukuk dominating the weights is the expected character of unlevered risk parity, not a bug.
Letting market volatility decide how much gets deployed. The Momentum sleeve has up to 15 slots, but the live slot count scales down when realized volatility is high, and the rest sits in cash. Same strategy, smaller exposure in rough conditions.
Momentum measured against an asset's own past rather than against other assets: is it up over the last 3 and 12 months, and trading above its own 200-day average?
The Trend sleeve goes long only the assets that pass all three tests and holds cash otherwise. Compare Relative Strength, which ranks names against each other.
The Quality sleeve's score. Each stock in the halal universe is percentile-ranked on return on equity, net margin, earnings yield and five-year earnings growth; the ranks are averaged into one number, heavily indebted names are excluded, and the top 15 are held for the quarter.
There is deliberately no trend filter — quality buys dips by design, with only a disaster stop underneath.
A rebalance rule that limits how many highly-correlated names a sleeve can hold at once, so a "top 15" doesn't quietly become one sector bet made fifteen times. A candidate that moves nearly in lockstep with an existing holding gets skipped in favour of the next-ranked name.
A cross-sleeve concentration check. All open positions, whichever sleeve holds them, are grouped by 60-day return correlation; anything above 0.8 is treated as the same bet, and a flag is raised when one cluster exceeds 25% of open positions.
It exists to catch the quiet failure mode where several sleeves independently buy flavours of the same trade.
The chip on each sleeve of the Portfolio page. ACTIVE means the sleeve is deployed per its rules. DEFENSIVE means its own risk rules — a risk-off regime, or high volatility — have moved it partly or fully to cash.
It describes the sleeve's current state, not a forecast.
Every trade in the ledger ends with exactly one label, so wins and losses can't be reclassified after the fact:
New ideas start in a lab: signals are logged and graded on paper (the bullish-divergence trial, the PEAD lab below) while no model capital trades them. To graduate, an idea has to pass its kill test — a bar agreed in advance, like "beat simply holding SPUS over the same stretch."
Even a graduate enters under a sleeve ceiling: the Swing sleeve is hard-capped at 5% of the account no matter how well it does. Strategies that fail their kill test get shut down, not tweaked until they pass.
The tendency of stocks that just beat earnings estimates to keep drifting upward for weeks afterward — one of the oldest documented market anomalies. On this site it's lab-only: signals are logged and graded against SPUS, but no sleeve trades them yet.