Clicked Gallery
Difficult terms, explained the Clicked way: a short overview first, more detail when you want it, and an analogy that makes it stick. Start at whichever depth suits you, or switch to Slang mode. The extension does the same on any webpage or PDF.
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What are “synergies”?
Two merged companies earning more together than apart — the claim, the math, and the donut-shop version.
How to actually read a research paper
Skim smart, break the jargon wall, and keep what you learned — one session, done right.
What is an EBITDA Adjustment?
Add-backs that show “normal-year” profit — the fair ones, the sketchy ones, and how to tell them apart.
What is a Toxic Convertible Bond?
The loan that pays the lender more as your stock falls — and why it's called a death spiral.
What is a Clawback Provision?
When bonuses get un-paid: restated numbers, returned money, boats included.
What is Double Gearing?
The same capital counted twice across a group — and why regulators subtract it.
CapEx vs. OpEx: What's the Real Difference?
Own it or rent it: how one classification changes profit, taxes, and EBITDA optics.
What is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)?
Make the AI answer from your documents — retrieval first, generation second, receipts included.
What are Vector Embeddings?
Meaning turned into coordinates — how machines find what's similar without matching a single word.
What does an Idempotent API mean?
Why ten clicks charge you once — the property that makes retries safe.
What is Technical Debt?
Shortcuts and aging systems that bill the future — principal, interest, and repayment.
What is a Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)?
Prove something is true without revealing why — the cryptography behind private verification.
What is Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD)?
Millions of dials, one wrongness score — how models actually learn, tiny step by tiny step.
What is the Bias-Variance Tradeoff?
Too rigid vs. too impressionable — and why total error is lowest in between.
Overfitting vs. Underfitting: What's the Difference?
Memorized the answers vs. never opened the book — and the score gap that exposes both.
What is Backpropagation?
How one final error becomes a precise adjustment for millions of settings — Goal Seek at scale.
What is an Abstraction Layer?
Simple on top, complexity hidden underneath — and swappable without breaking anything.
What is an Indemnification Carve-Out?
The exception list that matters more than the liability cap — fraud and friends escape it.
What does Signed in Counterparts mean?
Why nobody needs to sign the same piece of paper — each copy counts as an original.
What is a Severability Clause?
One clause dies, the contract survives — how bad provisions get removed without killing deals.
What is a Condition Precedent?
The duty that doesn't exist until something happens first — and why its failure isn't a breach.
What is Joint and Several Liability?
Why any one co-signer can owe the entire debt — and who really carries the insolvency risk.
What does Void ab Initio mean?
The contract that never existed — erased from the start, not canceled from today.
What is a Force Majeure Clause?
When disasters pause a contract without breach — and why the list of events decides everything.
What is an Entire Agreement Clause?
Why the written contract is the whole deal — earlier promises don't count.
What is a Limitation of Liability Cap?
The ceiling on what a vendor can owe you — and the exclusions that matter even more.
What is the Right of First Refusal (ROFR)?
Why an insider gets to match your buyer's deal — same price, same terms, their call.
What is the RSI (Relative Strength Index)?
A 0–100 gauge of how hard price has been sprinting — and why 70 isn't a sell button.
What is the MACD Indicator?
Two price averages, one gap — how traders read whether a trend is speeding up or fading.
What are Support and Resistance Levels?
The price floors and ceilings where buyers and sellers keep showing up — and what a break means.
SMA vs. EMA: What's the Difference?
Equal votes vs. recent-days-count-extra — the steadiness-versus-speed choice behind trend lines.
How do Candlestick Charts Work?
Four prices, one shape — how a candle shows who controlled the session at a glance.
Golden Cross vs. Death Cross: What do they Signal?
The 50-day average crossing the 200-day — what it means, why it's late, and why millions watch.
What does Volume tell you in Trading?
Shares traded = participation — how much agreement stood behind a price move.
What is a Breakout (and a Fakeout)?
Price finally passing a level it kept failing at — and the three checks that separate real from fake.
What is a Short Squeeze?
When short sellers are forced to buy — and their own buying drives the price they're fleeing.
What are Bollinger Bands?
A 20-day average with self-sizing boundaries — a live map of how volatile a stock has been.
What is a Hurdle Rate?
The minimum return an investment must clear — the screening bar for projects and the payout gate for fund managers.
What is a PIK Toggle Note?
A loan where the borrower can pay interest in cash — or stack it onto the loan at a higher rate.
What is Deferred Revenue?
Cash collected for work not yet delivered — in the bank, but owed back in future work.
Enterprise Value vs. Market Cap: Simply Explained
The price of the shares vs. the cost of owning the business — debt added, cash subtracted.
What is a Debt-to-EBITDA Multiple?
Total debt measured in years of earnings — the tripwire lenders write into loan contracts.
What is Entropy?
Why heat spreads, ice melts, and rooms never tidy themselves — counting arrangements, not forces.
What is a Derivative?
The rate of change at one exact instant — the speedometer to the odometer's total.
What is Torque?
Force times distance from the pivot — why long handles beat strong arms.
SN1 vs SN2 Reactions: What's the Difference?
One-step shove or leave-then-fill: how crowding on a carbon picks the substitution route.
What is Electronegativity?
How hard an atom pulls shared electrons — the tug-of-war behind polar bonds and water's powers.
What is a Limit?
Where a function is heading as it closes in on a point — even when it never arrives.
What is Le Chatelier's Principle?
Disturb a balanced reaction and it shifts — settling at a new balance, not the old one.
What is Standard Deviation?
How far the numbers wander from their average — the spread two identical averages can hide.
What is Activation Energy?
The energy hill every reaction climbs before it starts — and how catalysts shorten it.
What is Newton's Third Law?
Every push comes with an equal push back — on a different object, which is why things move.
What is an Integral?
Adding up endless tiny slices to get a total — distance from speed, area from a curve.
What is Continuity?
No jumps, no holes: why some graphs can be drawn without lifting the pen, and what breaks it.
What is Momentum?
Mass times velocity — the motion an object carries, and why crumple zones save lives.
What is a p-value?
How easily luck alone could fake a result — and what 0.05 actually means.
What is pH?
The 0–14 acidity scale where every step is ten times — and why blood guards its number.
What is a Context Window?
How much text an AI can hold in mind at once — and why long chats forget their start.
What is Tokenization?
How AI chops text into chunks before reading — and why some languages cost more.
What is Temperature in AI?
The dial between same-answer-every-time and creative gambles — and where products set it.
What is Prompt Injection?
Hidden orders inside content an AI reads — and why the attacker's text wins.
What is Quantization?
Storing a model's numbers less precisely — half the memory, barely any loss.
What are Liquidated Damages?
A pre-agreed fine written into the contract, and why courts void the scary ones.
What is a Tolling Agreement?
The contract that freezes a lawsuit deadline so both sides can keep talking.
What is Estoppel?
Why the law will not let you take back a promise someone already acted on.
What is Novation?
Swapping a party out of a contract completely, and why the third signature is everything.
What is Subrogation?
How your insurer pays you first, then hunts down whoever caused the loss.
What are Call and Put Options?
The right to buy or sell at a locked price, and why buyers risk only the premium.
What is Implied Volatility?
The move the market expects, priced into options, and why IV crush burns earnings bets.
What is Delta in Options?
How much of each $1 stock move your option captures, and its three readings.
What is Gamma in Options?
Why option sensitivity accelerates, and how that snowballing fuels gamma squeezes.
What is Theta Decay?
Why options lose value every day the clock runs, and who collects that daily drip.
What is Mezzanine Debt?
The loan between the banks and the owners, and why standing there costs 12 to 20%.
What is an Earn-Out?
Sale money paid only if the business hits its targets after closing, and who controls the levers.
What is Dry Powder?
The raised-but-unspent cash funds are sitting on, and why the pile pressures prices.
What is Working Capital?
The cushion between paying your costs and collecting your money, and the profitable-but-broke trap.
What is a Goodwill Impairment?
The formal confession that an acquisition was overpaid, and why no cash moves when it hits.
What is an AI Hallucination?
Why AI states made-up facts with total confidence, and why you can't hear it happening.
What is Fine-Tuning?
Training a finished model a little more on your own data, and how that differs from RAG.
What are AI Agents?
AI that acts instead of just answering: the plan-do-check loop, and why the loop is also the risk.
What is a Transformer (in AI)?
The design behind the T in GPT: every word attends to every other word, all at once.
What is Model Distillation?
Training one model on another model's answers: to shrink your own, or to catch up to a rival's.
Open-Source vs Closed-Source AI Models: What's the Difference?
Who controls the model, who sees your data, and who gets paid per request.
What is a Neural Network?
Math that learns the rules from examples instead of having them written, and why that wins.
What is Inference (in AI)?
The model doing its actual job, and why the cheap half ends up costing the most.
What is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning?
Why a model that shows its work answers better, and what the thinking costs.
What is a Mixture of Experts (MoE)?
Huge model, a small slice awake per question, and why that keeps frontier models affordable.
What is Synthetic Data?
Training data made by machines, why labs increasingly rely on it, and how it goes wrong.
What is a Zero-Day Vulnerability?
A hole only the attacker knows about, why it costs a fortune, and what actually breaks most systems.
What is a Confidence Interval?
The range a study reports around its result, and why a wide one means nobody knows yet.
What is a Control Group?
The group that gets nothing, and why a study without one proves almost nothing.
Correlation vs. Causation: What's the Difference?
Two things moving together is not one causing the other, and the gap is where bad headlines live.
What is Sample Size?
How many were actually studied, why small numbers mislead, and why big ones are not automatically better.
What is Peer Review?
Who checks a study before publication, what that catches, and what it does not.
What is an API?
The fixed agreement that lets two programs work together without knowing each other's insides.
What is a Multimodal Model?
AI that takes images, audio and text together, and what that costs in speed and reliability.
What are AI Benchmarks?
The scores behind every AI launch, what they measure, and why the leader can still disappoint.
What is Edge Computing?
Doing the work on the device instead of a data centre, and the three situations that require it.
What is End-to-End Encryption?
Why nobody in the middle can read the message, and what it still leaves visible.
What is RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)?
The step that turns a text predictor into an assistant, and what it quietly teaches the model.
What is a randomized controlled trial (RCT)?
Chance picks who gets the pill, so the pill explains the result.
What is the placebo effect?
The pill is sugar and the relief is real, which is why every drug has to beat it.
What is a meta-analysis?
Many small studies merged into one answer, and why the merge can still mislead.
What does statistically significant mean?
It means probably not luck. It does not mean big, useful, or true.
What is regression to the mean?
An extreme result is usually followed by an ordinary one, and something else takes the credit.
What is recursive self-improvement?
An AI helps build the next AI, which builds the one after that, better each round.
What are breadcrumbs on a website?
The small line of links at the top of a page showing the path from the home page down to where you are.
What is an agent harness?
The program wrapped around an AI model that actually runs the tools and repeats the loop.
What is free cash flow?
The cash a business has left after paying to keep itself running, and what nobody can fake about it.
What is a basis point?
One hundredth of a percentage point, used because saying "one percent" is ambiguous.
What is dilution?
Your percentage of the company falls. Whether that costs you depends on the price the new shares sold at.
What is a half-life?
The time it takes for half of something to disappear, when whatever survives keeps vanishing at the same pace.
What is a log scale?
A chart axis where each step multiplies instead of adds, so 1, 10, 100 sit evenly apart.
What is exponential growth?
Growth that multiplies rather than adds, so each round gains more than the one before.
What is a catalyst?
Speeds up a reaction, survives it untouched, and cannot change how the reaction ends.
Energy vs power: what's the difference?
Power is the rate, energy is the total. It is why your bill charges kWh and never kW.
What is a large language model (LLM)?
A program that predicts what text comes next, then taught separately to answer rather than ramble.
What is training (in AI)?
The process that builds a model by example. Chatting with it afterwards changes nothing.
Machine learning vs AI: what's the difference?
AI is the goal. Machine learning is the method that took over. The words are not interchangeable.
What is context engineering?
Deciding everything a model sees before it answers, rather than how the question is worded.
What is a knowledge cutoff?
The date a model stopped learning. It limits what the model knows, not what it can be told.
What is DNA?
A long chemical instruction list, written in four letters, copied into nearly every cell.
What is force?
A push or a pull between two objects. When several act at once, only the leftover does anything.
What is an atom?
The smallest piece of an element that still counts as that element. Split it and you get something else.
What is mRNA?
A short-lived copy of one gene, carried out to where proteins get built, then destroyed.
Fusion vs fission: what's the difference?
Fission splits heavy atoms apart. Fusion forces light ones together. Both release energy.
What is a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)?
A contract that lets someone show you a secret, and bill you for spilling it.
What is a Non-Compete Clause?
The clause that bars you from working for rivals for a while after you leave.
What is a Power of Attorney?
The document that lets someone else legally act as you, exactly as far as you allow.
What is a Statute of Limitations?
The legal deadline for bringing a case, after which even a strong claim is barred.
What is Consideration (in Contract Law)?
The something-for-something exchange that turns a promise into a contract.
What is AGI (artificial general intelligence)?
The hypothetical AI that could handle anything a person can. It does not exist yet, and there is no agreed test for it.
What is a GPU (graphics processing unit)?
The chip that does thousands of calculations at once. Built for graphics, now the engine of AI.
What is cloud computing?
Renting computers over the internet instead of owning them. Most of the apps you use live there.
What is a VPN (virtual private network)?
A service that encrypts your internet traffic and sends it out through its own server, so others see less of you.
What is a system prompt?
The hidden instructions a chatbot reads before your conversation starts. Every reply is shaped by them.
What is effect size?
How big a difference actually is, separate from whether it's real. The number news stories skip.
What is survivorship bias?
Judging by the winners because the losers aren't around to be counted. The most common way data lies.
What is selection bias?
When how you picked your sample decides the answer before the study starts. Big samples don't fix it.
What is a double-blind study?
A trial where neither the participants nor the researchers know who got the real treatment, so nobody's expectations can shape the result.
What is a preprint?
A research paper posted publicly before peer review. Fast, free to read, and not yet checked.
What is an API key?
The string that tells a service which account is calling, and which one to bill. Not a password.
What is a cache?
Copies kept close so the slow trip isn't made twice. Why it makes things fast, and why clearing it fixes things.
What is latency?
The wait between asking and the answer starting to arrive. Not the same as slow internet, and more capacity won't fix it.
What are scaling laws?
The pattern behind the AI race: bigger models get better on a curve you can forecast, and each step costs ten times the last.
What is AI alignment?
Getting AI to pursue what we meant, not the letter of what we said. Why that gap exists and why it widens as systems get capable.
What is the bid-ask spread?
Every market has two prices, and the gap between them is what "trade right now" costs. The invisible fee nobody bills you for.
What is a margin call?
The demand for cash that arrives when investments bought with borrowed money fall. Pay up fast, or the broker sells for you.
What is slippage?
You clicked at one price and got filled at another. Where the gap comes from, when it's worst, and the one honest way to cap it.
What is the Sharpe ratio?
How much return per unit of risk. The number that separates skill from a lucky gamble when two investments both "did well".
What are stop-loss and take-profit orders?
Two standing orders that exit a trade for you: one caps the damage below, one banks the gain above. Set while calm, executed without you.
What is liquidity?
How fast something turns into cash without the sale dragging the price down. Why it matters most exactly when it disappears.
What is an order book?
The live list of everyone waiting to buy or sell, sorted by price. Where prices actually come from, and what "depth" means.
Limit order vs market order: what's the difference?
One guarantees the trade happens, the other guarantees the price. You cannot have both, and knowing which you gave up is the whole skill.
What is EBITDA?
Profit counted before interest, tax and the charges for things bought years ago, so rival companies line up on one scale.
What is WACC?
The blended price of a company's money, counting both the lenders who charge interest and the shareholders who never send an invoice.
What is a DCF valuation?
Forecast the cash a business will produce, shrink the cash from future years to reflect the wait, and add it up. That total is what it is worth today.
What is accretion and dilution in a deal?
Whether a takeover raises or lowers the buyer's earnings per share, which depends more on how the deal was paid for than on the company bought.
What is a Net Working Capital Adjustment?
The post-closing price change that settles what the business was actually carrying on the day.
What is a Run-Rate?
One short period stretched into a year: useful when the year does not exist yet.
What are Debt Covenants?
The conditions attached to borrowed money, and the two ways they get broken.
What is a Locked Box?
Fixing the price of a company on a past balance sheet, with no adjustment after.
What is the Interest Coverage Ratio?
Earnings divided by the interest bill: how many times over a company covers it.
What is Amortization?
A starting amount worked down to zero on a schedule: loans, patents, and the A in EBITDA.
What is the Cost of Equity?
The return shareholders require for the risk of owning a company's shares.
What is Inflation?
Prices rising everywhere at once, and why the same money buys less every year.
What is the Null Hypothesis?
The "nothing is going on" claim every study has to beat, and why beating it proves less than you think.
What are False Positives and False Negatives?
The two ways a test can be wrong, why fixing one makes the other worse, and how to choose.
What is a Confounding Variable?
The hidden third factor that makes two unrelated things look like cause and effect.
What is Publication Bias?
Why the studies that found nothing never get published, and what that does to everything you read.
What is a Funnel Plot?
The chart that shows when studies are missing from the record, and why it is not the sales funnel.
What is Anecdotal Evidence?
Why one person's story is not proof, why it feels like proof anyway, and what it is actually good for.
What is an Outlier?
The one number far from the rest, how it bends the average, and the three things it can turn out to be.
Mass vs weight: what's the difference?
Mass is what you're made of; weight is how hard gravity pulls on it. Your scale is hiding the difference.
Ionic vs covalent bond: what's the difference?
One atom gives an electron, or two atoms share a pair. That choice decides whether you get salt or water.
Oxidation vs reduction: what's the difference?
Losing electrons is oxidation, gaining them is reduction, and the names point the wrong way.
Vector vs scalar: what's the difference?
A scalar is a size. A vector is a size with a direction. Ask "which way?" and you've sorted it.
What is CRISPR?
Molecular scissors with a postcode: write twenty letters, cut one spot, and the cell does the editing.
Heat vs temperature: what's the difference?
Temperature is how hot. Heat is how much energy moved. A bath beats a cup of tea on the second and loses on the first.
Accuracy vs precision: what's the difference?
Accurate is near the truth. Precise is near each other. The scale that is 20 grams high every time is only one of them.
Endothermic vs exothermic: what's the difference?
An exothermic reaction gives heat out and warms the room. An endothermic one takes heat in and cools it.
Mass number vs atomic number: what's the difference?
Atomic number says which element it is. Mass number says how much mass that one atom has. Carbon-12 and carbon-14 share the first and differ on the second.
Conductor vs insulator: what's the difference?
A conductor lets electricity and heat through; an insulator holds them back. Free electrons are the whole difference.
Distance vs displacement: what's the difference?
Distance is how far you went. Displacement is how far you got, and which way. Twelve miles of winding road between towns 8 miles apart gives 12 of one and 8 of the other.
What is a Leaving Group?
The atom or group that breaks off a molecule and takes the bond's electrons with it. The more stable it is with them, the more readily it goes.
Work vs energy: what's the difference?
Energy is what an object has. Work is energy a force moves into or out of the object. Lifting a box is work; the box on the shelf has the energy.
Nucleophile vs electrophile: what's the difference?
A nucleophile has electrons to offer. An electrophile has room for them. The names describe what each one seeks, not what it holds.
Levers and moments: how do they work?
A lever is a stiff bar on a pivot. A moment is force times distance from that pivot. Push further out and a small push beats a big load.
What is a Market Maker?
The firm that stands ready to buy or sell at every moment, quoting both prices at once and trading from its own inventory. It sells immediacy and earns the spread for it.
What is Payment for Order Flow?
The money a trading firm pays your broker for the right to fill your trades. It is why trading apps charge no commission, and why your order never reaches an exchange.
What is a Dark Pool?
The private venue where funds trade big blocks of shares without listing those orders publicly. An order names a size but no price, waits unseen, and settles at whatever the open market says. It hides the order, not the trade.
What is Short Interest?
The number of shares in a company that have been sold short and not yet bought back, published as a percentage of the float, the shares actually available to trade. It measures buying that still has to happen, and it reaches you a week or more after the fact.
What is the Wash-Sale Rule?
The US tax rule that refuses a loss on shares to an investor who buys the same shares back within 30 days either side of the sale. It asks whether you actually left the position, and the refused loss moves onto the cost of the new shares.
What is an Iron Condor?
Four option contracts on one stock, sold and bought in pairs, that pay you a fee up front if the price stays inside a range you pick. The two you buy set a firm limit on what leaving that range can cost you.
What's the Difference Between an ETF and a Mutual Fund?
Both are baskets of investments you buy whole. One prices itself once a day by arithmetic, the other gets priced all day by the people trading it, and that difference drives everything else.
What is a Stock Split?
A company divides each share into several, the price falls to match, and your stake is worth exactly what it was. Why companies bother anyway, and what a reverse split says.
Nothing here yet — new explanations land regularly.