Glossary of Stock Market

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B

Back door listing
A strategy of going public used by a company that fails to meet the criteria for listing on a stock exchange. To get onto the exchange, the company desiring to go public acquires an already listed company.

Backend load
Sales charge paid when selling a mutual fund - also known as deferred load. (For instance, alimony can be said to be a back-end load)

Bad Debt
A debt that is not collectible and therefore worthless to the creditor. This debt, once considered to be bad, will be written off by the company as an expense.

Balance Sheet
A financial statement that summarizes a company's assets, liabilities and shareholders' equity at a specific point in time. These three balance sheet segments give investors an idea as to what the company owns and owes, as well as the amount invested by the shareholders.

Balanced Fund
A mutual fund that invests its assets into the money market, bonds, preferred stock, and common stock with the intention to provide both growth and income.

Bankruptcy
The state of a person or firm unable to repay debts.

Bar Chart
A style of chart used by some technical analysts, the top of the vertical line indicates the highest price a security traded at during the day, and the bottom represents the lowest price. The closing price is displayed on the right side of the bar, and the opening price is shown on the left side of the bar. A single bar like the one below represents one day of trading.

Basis Point
A unit that is equal to 1/100th of 1%, and is used to denote the change in a financial instrument. The basis point is commonly used for calculating changes in interest rates, equity indexes and the yield of a fixed-income security.

Bear Market
A weak and falling market where buyers are absent (Usually because they burnt their fingers when they held on too long to their shares when the market was rising.) Generally correlates with recession. An opportunity to buy at low prices, in hope (usually) fulfilled if you wait long enough) of an upturn. Low capital investors may have a problem in holding on to stocks for a long period. This is the reverse of the bull market. Hence, the strategy would also be reversed but be cautious. It is more difficult to tell when a falling stock is going to reverse direction than to predict when a rising is likely to fall.

Bear Market
A market condition in which the prices of shares are falling or are expected to fall.

Best Ask
The lowest quoted ask price for a particular share among those offered from competing market makers.

Best Bid
The highest quoted bid for a particular share among all those offered by competing market makers.

Blue Chip Stock
Shares of well-established and financially strong corporations, with little investment risk and a history of earnings and dividend payments. These stocks usually form the base of a portfolio and allow for higher gain (and higher risk) speculation in other stocks. Investment in such stocks is more for capital appreciation than for return on investment since most blue chips trade at high market prices. Best to allocate a portion of your annual income for the purchase of investment stocks over the long term.

Blue Chip
A nationally recognized, well-established and financially sound company.

Bond
A debt investment with which the investor loans money to an entity (company or government) that borrows the funds for a defined period of time at a specified interest rate

Bond
A bond is a debt instrument issued by an entity for the purpose of raising capital. A long term promissory note issued by a corporation. A bond can be issued by a corporation or other entity such as state or municipal governments or the Central Bank of the country. Bonds normally have a set maturity (term) and interest (coupon) rate associated with them. In simpler word, you are in effect lending money to the entity which issues the bonds for a specified period in return for a fixed rate of return till the bonds mature, at which point you get back your principal investment.

Book Building
The process by which an underwriter attempts to determine at what price to offer an IPO based on demand from institutional investors.

Bond Rating

A grade evaluating the quality of a bond

Book Closure
A company's announcement of a dividend or bonus to investors.

Book Closure
A company closes its register of members for updating the records to facilitate payment of dividends or issue of tights of bonus shares. Book closure is the period during which this process is done and deliveries are not affected in the clearing house.

Book value
Total shareholder equity from the balance sheet divided by the number of shares outstanding.

Book Value
The net asset value of a company, calculated by total assets minus intangible assets (patents, goodwill) and liabilities.

Boom
A period of time during which sales or business activity increases rapidly.

Bottom
The lowest point or price reached by a financial security, commodity, index or economic cycle in a given time period, which is followed by a steady increase.

Bottom Fisher
An investor who looks for bargains among stocks whose prices have recently dropped dramatically. The investor believes that the recent price drop is temporary and a recovery is soon to follow.

Bottom Line
Refers to a company's net earnings.

Bonus Shares
Shares allotted to the existing shareholders by capitalizing the reserves into additional capital. When the market expects a company to come out with a Bonus Issue, the price of the shares normally goes up. Following a bonus issue, though the number of total shares increase, the proportional ownership of shareholders does not change.

Breakout
A price movement through an identified level of support or resistance, which is usually followed by heavy volume and increased volatility. Traders will buy the underlying asset when the price breaks above a level of resistance and sell when it breaks below support.

Bourse
A stock exchange

Breakout
A technical analysis term meaning a stock price has moved above or below a previous trading range.

Broker
An individual or firm that charges a fee or commission for executing buy and sell orders submitted by an investor.

Bridge/Mezzanine Funding
Financing for a company expecting to go public within 6-12 months; usually so structured as to be repaid from proceeds of a public offering, or to establish a floor price for public offer.

Broad Based Fund (sub-account)
A fund which has a minimum of 20 shareholders without any single investor holding more than 10 percent of the shares and units of the fund is known as broad Based Fund.

Brokerage Account
An arrangement between an investor and a licensed brokerage firm that allows the investor to deposit funds with the firm and place investment orders through the brokerage, which then carries out the transactions on the investor's behalf.

Broker
An agent who handles the public's orders to buy and sell stocks, commodities or other property. Full service brokers are those that provide a wide range of investment services, research and advice. A full service account representative usually works on a commission basis, thereby generating income on the number of his clients' trades. Discount brokers are not in the business of giving investment advice they usually work on salary, limit their services to trade executions and collect substantially lower fees.

BSE Sensex
A stock index (one of many) commonly used as an indicator of changes in the general level of the stock prices in India . In this index, there are 30 diversified stocks traded on the Mumbai Stock Exchange which are thought to be representative of the market in general.

Bubble
A surge in equity prices, often more than warranted by the fundamentals and usually in a particular sector, followed by a drastic drop in prices as a massive selloff occurs.

Bull
An operator who expects the share price to rise and takes a position in the market to sell at a later date.

Bull Market
A financial market of a certain group of shares in which prices are rising or are expected to rise.

Bull Market
A rising market where buyers far outnumber the sellers. Rising stock prices (generally occur during boom years). Amateur investors could lose a lot of money in this phase of the market. They hold back money in this phase of the market. They hold back selling in expectation of still higher gains and sometimes are left high and dry when the market crashes. Anything that goes up has to come down is a law of physics that holds well in the stock market, too. Long term investors are usually less harmed since their perspective is 3 to 5 years or even more and the market tends to level out over a period of time. A critical decision is when to sell on a bull market. the best procedure is to decide within yourself that you will satisfied by a specified margin eg profit on your investment (say, 10, 15, 20 percent or wherever) and then sell at that point, regardless of every one predicting that share prices are sure to go up still further and you would be a fool to sell at this point. Ignore them. Book your specified profit, that is, sell your shares and put the money in your bank. If the Bull Run still continues, invest a lesser sum, decide your margin of profit, and repeat the procedure. There will come a time when the Bull Run stops, that is the share prices reverse direction. Sell immediately and rest content that you have been wise enough to book profits at different points of the Bull Run . Your losses are thus restricted to the period after your last profit taking. You then offer your sympathy to investors who did not disinvest and had to bear heavy loses. Duck if they take a swing at you.

Bullion
Gold and silver that is officially recognized as high quality (at least 99.5% pure), and is in the form of bars rather than coins.

Buy Transaction

When you place an order for stock, it can be executed depending on which type of exchange the stock is listed. There are two methods of execution (i) the online exchange which is connected via satellite, or (ii) the outcry method, which is executed on the floor of the exchange. The first method is instantaneous, whereas the second can be a little time consuming. It takes time for a stock order to be sent by the broker to the stock exchange floor. A person on the stock market floor bids to find a buyer for the stock. The stock is then purchased or sold and the broker finally notified of the price and how much money to deduct from the customer's account plus his broker fee. The total time is an estimated 20 minutes.

Buy
A recommendation to purchase a specific security.

Buy and Hold
A passive investment strategy in which an investor buys stocks and holds them for a long period of time, regardless of fluctuations in the market.

Buy Back
The buying back of outstanding shares (repurchase) by a company in order to reduce the number of shares on the market. Companies will buyback shares either to increase the value of shares still available (reducing supply), or to eliminate any threats by shareholders who may be looking for a controlling stake.

Buyout Funding
Funds provided to enable a corporation to acquire another enterprise or product line or business. In the corporate world all major deals are leveraged, that is, funded by someone else. Try doing this in your personal life and you will probably go to jail.

 

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