Glossary

A margin call is the broker asking for more collateral, immediately.

Pay up or the broker sells for you — usually at the worst price, in the falling market that caused the call.

Engineering tolerance for money. It exists because your estimate has error bars.

Brought in after brokers were found misusing client securities, so the protection is real. The cost is that releasing the pledge before a sale is now your operational problem — an unreleased pledge is a short delivery even though the shares are visibly in your account.

The average is history and this is the forecast. When it sits above the average, the average will climb on its own as old paper matures and is replaced — without the company borrowing one extra rupee.

A loan at roughly 12–18% a year that the app displays as “extra buying power”.

Never read it without GNPA: a rising margin earned by lending to riskier borrowers is not skill. It is also not the same number as the lending spread, because the margin counts the assets funded by the lender’s own capital, which cost nothing.

It stands in for net margin, because an insurer's reported profit falls precisely when it sells more. A fast-growing insurer looks worse on P/E than one that has stopped selling.

The part of every extra rupee of sales that is actually left over to pay the rent.

The mechanism behind the expiry-week calendar. Positions are unwound because holding them got expensive on a fixed schedule, not because anyone changed their mind about the company — which is why so many of those moves reverse in the new series.

On top, never instead. Adding it to SPAN is what turns the leverage figure people quote into the real one — usually nearer five or six times contract value than the number an advertisement implies.

Its stability through a cost cycle says more than its level in calm conditions.

How much of each rupee of sales survives the cost of actually running the business.

The rule that quietly ended the intraday leverage Indian brokers once advertised. Being flat by the close no longer helps if the position was larger when a snapshot was taken, and the shortfall attracts a penalty.

It rises when volatility rises, which is precisely the day the position is losing money. The margin call and the loss are correlated by design, and that correlation is what turns a bad session into a forced exit.

It is revised annually against the wholesale price index — an index with no connection to what the company paid for its active ingredient. That asymmetry is the whole structural feature of price control.

It is why a sanctioned limit contracts exactly when the business contracts. The ceiling stays where it was and the money that can be drawn against it falls with the inventory and the debtors.

Tells you whether a high ROE comes from brand power, operational speed, or just debt.

The market pays badly for urgency. Almost every plan that fails does so at the moment its owner stopped being able to choose the date of the sale.

Pledge ₹1,00,000 with a 20% haircut and you get ₹80,000 of margin. Haircuts widen exactly when markets get volatile.

The moment a promoter's personal finances become your share price problem.

Pledged shares are encumbered, which complicates recovery if a broker fails.

Borrowing against your portfolio. You keep the shares; the broker gets a claim on them.

Watch the share of revenue against the share of units. When those two move apart, mix is doing the work rather than volume or price.

The number that speaks to whether the company will exist in year twenty-nine of a thirty-year policy. Check it once a year to notice drift, not to trade on.

It reacts to how the share has traded, not to anything the company did. The bite is 100% upfront margin, which usually reaches you as a rejected order or a margin call before you have read the circular.

It shows in employee cost before margin, and in margin before revenue.

Leverage available to anyone with a broker and no formal margin behind it. Ending it, and moving to rolling settlement, is why positions now settle on a fixed short cycle.

The end state of an industry with no barriers. Once buyers can compare on price in seconds, margin is permanently at risk however capable the operator.

Read share gain alongside margin — share bought with discounts is rented, not owned.

Indian rules require disclosure above 10% of revenue. It caps margins as well as threatening revenue.

A dormant account with a small debit quietly compounds it. Exchange margin penalties are separate and passed through in full.

Rising while revenue is flat compresses margin directly, and it is visible early.

A cost spike is a free experiment. Margins hold if there is pricing power, compress if there is not.

Not the same as what you can withdraw, and not the same as the margin the app offers you. Three numbers, three meanings.

The measure a capital raise cannot flatter. Net interest margin rises when more of the book is funded by shareholders’ money; the spread, being a difference of two rates, cannot move for that reason.

Read it for what it avoids. If margins fell and the section discusses industry tailwinds without ever naming margins, the omission is the information.

Where scheme receipts, scrap sales and export incentives usually land. Because it is inside revenue it is also inside EBITDA, which is how an operating margin improves without the manufacturing improving.

Multiplication does not care about order. Drawdown limits, margin calls and your own nerve do — which is why sequence decides whether you were still there for the good part.

It takes every single-stock future open at expiry and every single-stock option that finishes in the money, while index contracts stay cash-settled — which is why the two behave so differently in the final week. A cheap option finishing marginally in the money becomes an obligation for the full strike price times lot size.

A rent holiday with the end date printed in a public notification. Counting the cash is correct; carrying the margin past the tenure quietly assumes a scheme extension nobody has announced.

A falling price triggers margin calls, forcing lenders to dump shares — which drives price lower still.

The commission sets a return rather than a price, so the analysis moves to the allowance and the disallowances. Regulatory lag is where the margin actually goes: between an input cost rising and a tariff order recognising it, the company funds the gap itself.

Built for comparability rather than for the original year’s reporting. It lets you set a rival’s margins and working capital beside a listed company on a like basis.

It replaced the earlier MEIS after India’s export incentives were found inconsistent with WTO rules, and it is framed as a remission rather than a subsidy for that reason. It generally sits above EBITDA, so it lifts the operating margin rather than just the tax line.

Every shortening of the cycle narrows the window in which a counterparty can fail, and so the margin the system must collect. It also removes float somebody was earning on, which is why each change is resisted.

Raw materials and freight. Double the sales, double the spend, and the margin barely moves.