The financial world has developed a special investment-oriented language to help describe the stock market, investments, securities for the stock market, stock market analysis, and its conditions. At times you may be confronted with a term which is totally alien or has a completely different meaning from what you thought. Misunderstanding these terms can sometimes lead to the wrong conclusion, and that can cost you money!

What you don't know can hurt you.

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Managed Futures A managed account or fund in which professional money managers trade futures and forward contracts. Futures and forward contracts may represent agricultural products, bonds, cattle, currencies, financial instruments, gold, hogs, oil, silver, stock indexes and so on. They are actually contracts of delivery or receipt for a particular commodity between the seller and buyer of the contracts. You may trade these contracts individually, assuming all of the potential risk and reward for each contract, or invest collectively with other individuals in a managed account or fund, thus sharing the potential risk and rewards of many different contracts among investors.   Manager Tenure How many years a mutual fund manager has been running the fund. This is useful for determining how much of a fund's performance is attributable to its current management. A tenure of zero means the manager has been running the fund for less than one year.   Margin Account A brokerage account that lets an investor buy securities on credit or borrow against securities held in the account. Interest is charged on such borrowing, but usually at attractive rates compared with other forms of debt. Trading on margin can enhance investment returns considerably, but like all leveraged activities, can also backfire -- if your stocks go down, for instance. The trick is to make more investing the borrowed funds than they are costing you. SECP & Stock Exchange regulations limit the extent to which margin can be used in equities trading.   Margin Call A somewhat dreaded call for additional capital to bolster the equity in an investor's margin account. Say you've bought 100 shares of XYZ Corp. at Rs.10 each, for a total of Rs.1,000. You borrowed half of this from your broker. Now let's say XYZ falls to Rs.9. That means Rs 900 in equity is available to cover a Rs.500 debt, which sounds fine except the broker might require that lending not exceed 50%. Thus, you're now Rs.100 short of the minimum equity to maintain your margin position. If you can't provide additional cash or securities, the broker will sell your XYZ shares.   Marginal rate That's the highest percentage rate at which any of your income is taxed. "Marginal" usually refers to the increase you see in one category of anything from an increase in another: In this case, it's the highest tax rate that applies to any of your income exceeding a level set by tax law.