Glossary

Where most Indian trading actually happens. Home of the NIFTY 50.

An IPO in name and in reporting, under materially different rules. Analyst coverage is minimal, so promoter quality carries more weight here than anywhere else.

Offshore for regulatory purposes while sitting in Gujarat, which is how a dollar-denominated contract on India’s benchmark index can trade around the clock when the domestic market cannot. It keeps its own holiday calendar, so it sometimes trades when the Nifty does not.

The single largest lever on reported profit. Spend the same cash, show a much bigger number.

Useful as a benchmark for what is already priced in, not as a forecast. Being right with the consensus pays nothing.

Matters not because it is accurate but because it is what the price already reflects. Good results below consensus still fall.

You cannot know whether you disagree with it until you can state it. Being right about the consensus pays nothing.

Charged on your whole balance every year whether the fund wins or loses. It is the one certainty in investing.

Rent or EMI, fees, utilities, insurance — and for many Indian households, support to parents. Name it and size it rather than treating it as a surprise.

India’s oldest index and the one on the evening news.

The horizon that was ten years becomes ten days. It is why stopping for the day after a significant loss is protection rather than punishment.

A fee cap meant to hurt incumbents can kill their smaller competitors and leave them stronger. Several Indian regulations have worked exactly this way.

There is nothing to seize, so the lawful remedies are slow and expensive relative to the balance. The rate you were charged at the outset already priced that weakness.

The textbook version has the agent taking too much risk. Inside a family it usually inverts: the person managing a parent’s money carries the blame without the loss, and takes far too little.

The older exchange. More listed companies, much less trading volume.

The ₹1 lakh minimum lot is not a mark of quality — it is a regulatory warning label, set high deliberately to keep out investors who cannot absorb the loss.

A decided annual amount converts giving from a series of judgements under pressure into a budget line.

Most general insurers run above 100 and earn their profit on the float instead, which quietly makes them part investment business and sensitive to interest rates.

Cheap because the lender is exposed for weeks rather than years. Every rupee of it falls inside the next twelve months, always, and has to be reissued to somebody willing to buy it that week.

Same fund, same manager, same portfolio — typically 0.5–1% cheaper every single year.

It is meant to feel like dead money. That is the price of never being a forced seller.

Free, two pages, and it answers everything a star rating cannot.

The number every 8:30 am bulletin opens with. Compare it against its own level at 3:30 pm yesterday rather than against the Nifty cash close, and the basis cancels out — what remains is the genuine overnight change. It says nothing about any individual stock.

No mathematical constant governs a share price. The level works because a great many traders and algorithms place orders there — a genuine reason, simply not a mystical one.

Never cancel it to save money during an income gap — that is when it matters most.

Tax treatment usually drives the choice: an aggressive hybrid is taxed as equity, a conservative one as debt. With balanced advantage funds the rules vary enormously, so read the methodology rather than the category name.

Not a confiscation. The rightful owner can claim them back through a prescribed application verified by the company and then the authority, and it is far harder for an heir than for the person who bought the shares.

Four lines of arithmetic that turn a figure everybody quotes into a question about which note to open. Too low usually means something is being built; too high usually means the year-end debt figure is lower than the debt carried through the year.

Debt-to-equity says how much is borrowed; this says whether the company can actually afford it.

Lenders bring large numbers of small accounts to these sittings and often accept a reduction to close them. The finality is the point, and the reason to agree slowly.

A 45% win rate will hand you eight losses in a row. Plan for it before it happens, not during.

Why "I will sell when it returns to my buy price" is such a costly sentence.

The default measure of "the Indian market". A weighted average, so the biggest names dominate it.

The phrase is used to make a fall feel provisional, by people who in the same conversation describe a gain as booked. One rule applied in whichever direction is more comfortable.

The strike with the largest call open interest often acts as resistance and the largest put strike as support, because writers hedging those positions generate real buying and selling. One source of confluence, not a forecast.

Orders collect until 9:08, match until 9:12, and everyone who trades gets the same equilibrium price.

Same scheme, same manager, same portfolio as the direct plan, typically 0.5–1% dearer every year. The extra is charged whether or not any advice is ever given.

What a lender lends against decides how much it can lend. A change to a weight is a decision taken elsewhere that can end a growth plan without a rupee moving anywhere.

Shows up as excess cash and an inability to deploy a lump sum. It can also flip into compulsive spending.

The third stage of the escalation path, after the broker and the exchange, and free like all of them. It runs on written complaints with reference numbers, which is why a phone call is worth nothing here.

The obvious consequence is priced before you finish the sentence. Whatever return exists lives one step further on.

Whether your lender is one decides how a default unfolds. A home loan lender has a statutory route to the flat; an app that lent you ₹40,000 has a slow civil one to nothing in particular.

It belongs to the security, not the company, and it moves. The ordinary one lets you square off the same day; the trade-to-trade one does not, and the chart looks identical either way.

Last year's festival and wedding spending, divided by twelve. It turns three annual crises into a transfer you already made.

It is a bank, so the deposit insurance is identical up to the same limit. It pays more because it lacks a large cheap deposit base and lends to a riskier segment — not because the statutory cover is different.

Share issues, changes to the articles and much of managerial remuneration need one. The higher bar is where minority votes matter most.

Worth a few weeks of patience when the thesis is intact and the twelve-month mark is close. Never the deciding factor: tax on a gain costs far less than a large fall suffered while waiting for a date.

Supply on three separate sessions with no meaningful absorption on any of them. The repetition is the signal, not the size — and after an already extended decline it is as likely to mark exhaustion as continuation.

Emerging from a long dull base it is a trend starting. Arriving after a two-month run, with each candle smaller than the last and upper wicks lengthening, it is the last buyers rather than the first.

The only thing that pays. Agreement, however correct, is already in the price.

Without it, a bonus looks like a 50% crash and every indicator computed across it is nonsense.

The fund house. It earns the expense ratio whether the fund beats anything or not.

Domestic funds building over consecutive quarters is among the more reliable positive signals. One filing is a snapshot; four to eight of them is a trend.

No remittance and no forex paperwork, which is the appeal. Expenses are higher, and the industry-wide overseas investment limit has been hit before — schemes then stop accepting fresh money.

Growth that was bought rather than grown, at a price the revenue line never mentions. A mid-year acquisition flatters two consecutive years, and then stops.

Useful and unaudited. Timing slippage and changed guidance often appear here in a slide rather than in a separate announcement, so compare consecutive decks.

A quoted price with a handful of daily trades behind it is not a price you can transact at in size. Combine that with tight circuit limits and a bad announcement leaves you locked in for consecutive sessions.

You do not know whether the corpus must last twenty-five years or forty, which is why withdrawal rates are conservative.

For a chart reader the consequence matters more than the intent: a stretch of unusually small ranges is not by itself evidence that the next move will be small, so volatility measured over a quiet window understates what a stop has to survive.

It changes as the underlying moves, so the same underlying move produces a different premium response than it did an hour ago. A premium chart mixes that in with everything else.

Its expense ratio is charged annually on your whole balance whether the fund wins or loses — the one completely certain variable in investing.

Not the first trade of the day in the ordinary sense — it is the outcome of a fifteen-minute auction most traders never read about.

Four funds with the same top ten is one portfolio and four expense ratios.

A dated, public record of who lent to which entity and what was pledged. Unsecured borrowing creates no charge, so the register is one side of the picture rather than all of it.

The other side of the lease liability. It is depreciated over the term, which is where the old rent expense went.

One percent is the standard for most professional discretionary traders, and it takes around seventy consecutive losses to halve an account. Decide the loss first; the number of shares is arithmetic afterwards.

NSE publishes the percentage and Indian commentary quotes it every month without the one thing that gives it meaning — whether it was the longs or the shorts who rolled. Read it against the stock’s own three-month average, and beside the cost of carry.

The river moved, rather than the rain failing. Waiting is the most expensive possible response.

The conservative floor. Goodwill is the premium paid in past acquisitions, and it goes if those disappoint.

The level keeps moving, because expenses rise to meet income. Someone who could not spare ₹1,000 at ₹40,000 often cannot spare ₹10,000 at ₹1.5 lakh.

Funding with no interest line, no covenant and no credit rating, and none of it appears in borrowings, net debt to EBITDA or debt-to-equity. It is repayable on demand in the only sense that matters: the supplier can stop supplying.

A mistaken buy has to be paid for in full and sold the next day. Marked as the BE series on the NSE and the T group on the BSE, and it usually arrives with a narrowed price band attached.

When an Elliott count fails, the standard response is to renumber it rather than to conclude the method was wrong. A framework that cannot be wrong cannot be tested.

Costs, secured creditors, workers, unsecured creditors, government, then equity. Equity usually gets nothing.

The famous 4% comes from US data. Indian inflation has run higher, so be more conservative.