Numbers dressed up in fancy suits pretending to be words.
A trader who believes that staring at price charts and drawing lines on graphs can predict the future, also known as a technical analyst. They're basically financial astrologers with better software.
The time between paying suppliers and collecting from customers, measured in days. Negative is magical—you get paid before paying bills, turning working capital into a profit center. Positive means you're funding your customers' purchases with your own money.
Current assets divided by current liabilities, measuring whether you can pay short-term bills with short-term assets. A ratio above 1.0 suggests solvency; below suggests you should probably start returning the recruiters' calls.
The stuff you promise to forfeit if you can't pay back a loan—basically insurance for lenders who don't trust your word alone. It's the financial equivalent of leaving your driver's license at the bowling alley when you rent shoes. Can be your house, car, or collection of vintage Beanie Babies (though banks prefer the first two).
Information barriers within financial institutions designed to prevent conflicts of interest, like keeping the investment banking side from sharing insider information with the trading desk. Also increasingly called 'ethical walls' because geography.
Selectively choosing favorable data points while ignoring unfavorable ones, or choosing which trades to allocate to which accounts after seeing results. It's the art of making anything look good through strategic omission.
Loans with few or no maintenance covenants that would normally protect lenders, essentially trusting borrowers to be responsible without supervision. It's the financial equivalent of lending your car to a teenager with no curfew.
Basic goods traded in bulk markets where one unit is virtually identical to another—think oil, wheat, gold, or coffee beans before they get a fancy name at Starbucks. These fungible raw materials are bought and sold on specialized exchanges where traders gamble on price fluctuations. It's where agricultural products and natural resources become abstract financial instruments.
An economic system where the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit, creating a delightful paradox where the invisible hand of the market somehow manages to be both magical and occasionally prone to slapping people in the face. It's the reason your coffee costs $7 and someone had to invent the term 'disruption.' Love it or hate it, it's what's paying for your avocado toast.
A provision requiring executives to return compensation if certain conditions aren't met or if it was based on fraudulent numbers. It's the corporate version of 'give that back right now.'
An account that offsets another account on the balance sheet, like accumulated depreciation playing bad cop to your asset's good cop. It reduces the value of the related account without actually touching it.
The original purchase price of an asset used to calculate capital gains taxes, proving that the IRS wants documentation of every financial decision you've ever made. Lose track of it and prepare for tax-time panic.
A bank's capital expressed as a percentage of its risk-weighted assets, essentially measuring whether a financial institution has enough cushion to survive its own bad decisions. Regulators love it; bank executives pretend to.
An insurance contract against a borrower defaulting on debt, except it's called a 'swap' instead of insurance to avoid pesky insurance regulations. The financial instrument that nearly destroyed the global economy in 2008.
Abbreviated slang for cryptocurrency, used by people too busy day-trading Dogecoin to type out the full word. It's the linguistic equivalent of buying low and selling lower while pretending you understand blockchain technology.