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Digital assets and currencies

Understand assets, networks and trading mechanics with sources you can check.

Trading basics

Carried interest

Carried interest, or carry, in finance, is a share of the profits of an investment paid to the investment manager specifically in alternative investments (private equity and hedge funds). It is a performance fee, rewarding the manager for enhancing performance. Since these fees are generally not taxed as normal income, some believe that the structure unfairly takes advantage of favorable

Securities & exchanges

Contingent value rights

In corporate finance, Contingent Value Rights (CVR) are rights granted by an acquirer to a company’s shareholders, facilitating the transaction where some uncertainty is inherent. CVRs may be separately tradeable securities; they are occasionally acquired (or shorted) by specialized hedge funds.

Finance

Convertible arbitrage

Convertible arbitrage is a market-neutral investment strategy often employed by hedge funds. It involves the simultaneous purchase of convertible securities and the short sale of the same issuer's common stock.

Securities & exchanges

Financial innovation

Financial innovation is the act of creating new financial instruments as well as new financial technologies, institutions, and markets. Recent financial innovations include hedge funds, private equity, weather derivatives, retail-structured products, exchange-traded funds, multi-family offices, and Islamic bonds (Sukuk). The shadow banking system has spawned an array of financial innovat

Finance

Global assets under management

In finance, global assets under management consists of assets held by institutional investors and individual investors around the world. For example, these institutional investors include asset management firms, pension funds, endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds. In contrast, individual investors include ultra high-net-worth individuals

Finance

Intangible asset finance

Intangible asset finance (IP finance) is the branch of finance that uses intangible assets such as intellectual property (legal intangible) and reputation (competitive intangible) to gain access to credit. Like other areas of finance, intangible asset finance is concerned with the interdependence of value, risk, and time.

Finance

Long/short equity

Long/short equity is an investment strategy generally associated with hedge funds. It involves buying equities that are expected to increase in value and selling short equities that are expected to decrease in value. This is different from the risk reversal strategies where investors will simultaneously buy a call option and sell a put option to simulate being long in a stock.

Fiat currencies

Matchbook FX

Matchbook FX was an Internet-based electronic communication network ("ECN" or Electronic Trading Network) for trading currency online in the Spot-FX or foreign exchange market. It operated between 1999 and 2002.

Securities & exchanges

Partial return reverse swap

In finance, partial return reverse swap (PRRS) is a type of derivative swap, a financial contract that transfers a percentage of both the credit risk and market risk of an underlying asset, usually half, while also transferring all of the ownership liabilities for estate planning, tax purposes, and insider trading rules.

Finance

Portfolio manager

A portfolio manager (PM) is a professional responsible for making investment decisions and carrying out investment activities on behalf of vested individuals or institutions. Clients invest their money for future growth, such as a retirement fund, endowment fund, or education fund. PMs work with a team of analysts and researchers and are responsible for establishing an investment strateg

Trading basics

Post-money valuation

Post-money valuation is a way of expressing the value of a company after an investment has been made. This value is equal to the sum of the pre-money valuation and the amount of new equity.

Trading basics

Pre-money valuation

"Pre-money valuation" is a term widely used in the private equity and venture capital industries. It refers to the valuation of a company or asset prior to an investment or financing. If an investment adds cash to a company, the company will have a valuation after the investment that is equal to the pre-money valuation plus the cash amount. That is, the pre-money valuation refers to the

Trading basics

Private placement agent

A private placement agent or placement agent is a firm assisting fund managers in the alternative asset class (e.g., private equity, infrastructure, real estate, hedge funds, and venture capital) and entrepreneurs/private companies (e.g., start-ups and growth capital companies) seeking to raise private financing through a so-called private placement.

Finance

Sovereign wealth fund

A sovereign wealth fund (SWF), or sovereign investment fund, is a state-owned investment fund that invests in real and financial assets such as stocks, bonds, real estate, precious metals, or in alternative investments such as private equity funds or hedge funds. Sovereign wealth funds invest globally. Most SWFs are funded by revenues from commodity exports or from foreign exchange reser

Finance

Spoofing (finance)

Spoofing is a disruptive algorithmic trading activity employed by traders to outpace other market participants and to manipulate markets. Spoofers feign interest in trading futures, stocks, and other products in financial markets creating an illusion of the demand and supply of the traded asset. In an order driven market, spoofers post a relatively large number of limit orders on one sid

Securities & exchanges

Synthetic CDO

A synthetic CDO is a variation of a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that generally uses credit default swaps (CDSs) and other derivatives to obtain its investment goals. As such, it is a complex derivative financial security sometimes described as a bet on the performance of other mortgage (or other) products, rather than a real mortgage security. The value and payment stream of a s

Finance

Taleb distribution

In economics and finance, a Taleb distribution is the statistical profile of an investment which normally provides a payoff of small positive returns, while carrying a small but significant risk of catastrophic losses. The term was coined by journalist Martin Wolf and economist John Kay to describe investments with a "high probability of a modest gain and a low probability of huge losses

Trading basics

Taxation of private equity and hedge funds

Private equity funds and hedge funds are private investment vehicles used to pool investment capital, usually for a small group of large institutional or wealthy individual investors. They are subject to favorable regulatory treatment in most jurisdictions from which they are managed, which allows them to engage in financial activities that are off-limits for more regulated companies.