Glossary

Find handy definitions of financial jargon quickly and easily.
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Account

An account is a sum of money to be invested. This may come from companies and high net worth individuals who would like large amounts of money to be managed for them. Often used interchangeably with portfolio or fund.

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API

An application programming interface (API) is a specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other.

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Alpha

Alpha represents the portion of a fund's return that is generated solely by the skills of the portfolio manager.  The Alpha (or Intercept) is the value on the Y axis when the X axis is zero.  When measuring two investments, usually a fund against an index, Alpha...

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Asset

In business and accounting, assets are everything of value that is owned by a person or company. The balance sheet of a company records the monetary value of the assets owned by the company It is money and other valuables belonging to an individual or business. The...

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AIFMD

Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) has now introduced this broad concept of risk management as an integral part of the responsibilities of the alternative investment fund managers (AIFM).

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Attribution

Attribution refers to a quality or characteristic. With regards to the investment community attribution is often analysed to assess a fund’s performance and therefore the abilities of the portfolio or fund managers.

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Absolute VaR

Absolute VaR is defined as the VaR of the UCITS capped as a percentage of NAV (Net Asset Value). Other UCITS related terms

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Annex IV Reporting

Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive (AIFMD) has now introduced this broad concept of risk management as an integral part of the responsibilities of the alternative investment fund managers (AIFM).

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Asset Class

Asset class is generally a group of securities with similar market characteristics, or subject to the same laws and regulations. The most commonly utilized asset classes include equity, bonds, cash and derivatives.

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Adjusted Sharpe Ratio

Adjusted Sharpe Ratio (ASR) explicitly adjusts for skewness and kurtosis by incorporating a penalty factor for negative skewness and excess kurtosis.  

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Active Weight

The difference in allocation of an individual security or portfolio segment between portfolio and the benchmark. For example, if a portfolio allocates 12% in the IT sector, and the benchmark's allocation in IT is 7%, then the Active Weight of the IT segment of the...

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Active Management

Active management refers to an investment strategy where the portfolio managers rely on extensive analytical research and market forecasts to make investment decisions with primary goal of outperforming the market indices.

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Annualized Rate

If return, or other portfolio performance statistic, is available for longer than one year, annualization is conversion of the numbers in order to get the yearly equivalent. Annualized numbers are comparable across different portfolios and instruments. Only periods...

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Asset Allocation

Allocation is the process of dividing the portfolio by chosen classification, such as asset class, country, currency, sector etc. Individual securities are then selected within chosen segments.Allocation effect in portfolio attribution corresponds to the difference in...

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Asset Allocation Software

The asset allocation dashboard shows an intuitive, visual breakdown of the assets in your portfolio. You can see both the absolute and relative allocation, as well as allocation trends over time. The table view provides additional statistics, such as long and short exposures and leverage.

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Arbitrage Pricing Theory

Proposed by Stephen Ross in 1976, APT is an asset pricing model which expresses expected returns of a financial asset as a linear function of various market factors.

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Beta

Beta is a relative measure of the sensitivity of portfolio return to changes in the benchmark return.  The Beta (or Slope) between two portfolios is the amount the first portfolio moves when the other moves by one unit.  For example a beta of 0.5 implies that if the...

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Benchmark

Benchmark is a rate (such as risk-free or interest rate), security or basket of securities the portfolio's relative performance is measured against.

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Bond

In finance, a bond is a debt security, in which the authorized issuer owes the holders a debt and, depending on the terms of the bond, is obliged to pay interest (the coupon) and to repay the principal at a later date, referred to as  maturity. A bond is a formal...

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Bonds – Spread

The spread is the difference between yields on 2 securities. Spreads are usually measured as difference between given bond's yield and a risk-free rate of corresponding maturity, or as difference between yields of 2 bonds of comparable features but different...

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Bonds – Convexity

A measure of the curvature in the relationship between bond prices and bond yields that demonstrates how the duration of a bond changes as the interest rate changes. Convexity is the second order derivative of bond price's sensitivity to interest rate changes, with...

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Bond Yield

Bond yield is the internal rate of return (IRR) that discounts its principal and coupon payments to its current traded price. It is expressed in % and is inversely related to bond’s price – the higher the bond’s price, the lower the yield, and vice versa. Yield is the...

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Bear/Bull-Market Beta

Beta, computed using the set of Bear returns, or the set of Bull returns. Bear/Bull-Market Beta is a relative measure of the sensitivity of a funds return to negative/positive changes in the benchmark return.  This breaks down the beta to show whether...

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