Glossary
One term per entry, defined plainly, collected here as they appear.
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annualized revenue run rate
A company's annualized revenue run rate is its most recent short period of sales, usually a single month, multiplied out to a full year to show what it would earn if that pace held, which makes a fast-growing company look impressive but is an estimate rather than money actually collected.
Defined Friday, October 9, 2026 -
basis point
A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so when you read that a yield rose 5 basis points, it moved 0.05%.
Defined Monday, August 17, 2026 -
bond buyback
A bond buyback is the government using cash to purchase its own previously issued debt back from investors, which adds a buyer to the market and nudges borrowing costs down, though it only works if the amount bought is large enough to matter against the size of the market.
Defined Friday, August 21, 2026 -
Bond selloff
A bond selloff is investors selling existing bonds in bulk, which pushes bond prices down and therefore pushes yields up, since a buyer who pays less for the same fixed interest payment earns a higher percentage return.
Defined Friday, September 25, 2026 -
Brent crude
Brent crude is the benchmark price for oil produced in the North Sea and it is the reference point most of the world uses when pricing crude, which is why news reports quote it alongside West Texas Intermediate, the separate benchmark for oil produced in the United States.
Defined Tuesday, September 1, 2026 -
comparable sales
Comparable sales, often shortened to same store sales or comps, measure how much more a retailer sold at locations it has already been running for at least a year, stripping out the growth that comes simply from opening new stores, which is why a company like Walmart can beat expectations on profit and still see its stock fall on this one number.
Defined Thursday, August 20, 2026 -
core inflation
Core inflation is the change in consumer prices with food and energy left out, because those two categories jump around so much month to month that they can hide the steadier trend the Federal Reserve actually uses when it decides where to set interest rates.
Defined Friday, September 11, 2026 -
core PCE
Core PCE is the inflation measure the Federal Reserve leans on most, tracking what Americans actually spend across the whole economy while stripping out food and energy prices because those two jump around too much to reveal the underlying trend.
Defined Wednesday, August 26, 2026 -
discount rate
A discount rate is the number investors use to translate money a company will earn in the future into what that money is worth today, and it climbs when government bond yields climb, which is why a jump in Treasury yields punishes fast-growing companies whose profits are furthest away far harder than it punishes steady ones.
Defined Monday, September 14, 2026 -
disinflation
Disinflation means prices are still going up but going up more slowly than before, which is different from deflation, where prices actually fall.
Defined Thursday, September 3, 2026 -
dot plot
The dot plot is the chart inside the Fed's quarterly projections where each official places a dot at the interest rate they think will be appropriate in each future year, and markets read it as the Fed's best guess about its own path, which is why it can move stocks more than the rate decision itself.
Defined Wednesday, September 16, 2026 -
Fed minutes
The Fed minutes are the detailed written account of a Federal Reserve interest rate meeting, released three weeks after the meeting itself, and markets read them closely because they show how divided officials were and what they expect to do at the next meeting.
Defined Wednesday, October 7, 2026 -
federal funds rate
The federal funds rate is the short term interest rate the Federal Reserve sets for banks lending to each other overnight, and it is the lever the Fed pulls to slow inflation, because moving it pushes credit card rates, loan rates, and savings account payouts up or down across the whole economy.
Defined Monday, August 31, 2026 -
flash PMI
A flash PMI is an early monthly survey asking purchasing managers at hundreds of companies whether business activity, orders and costs rose or fell, where any reading above 50 means growth and below 50 means contraction, and because it arrives weeks before official government statistics it often moves markets more than the harder data that confirms it later.
Defined Wednesday, September 23, 2026 -
guidance
Guidance is a company's own public forecast of the sales and profits it expects in the months ahead, and because a share price reflects what a company will earn rather than what it already earned, cutting guidance can sink a stock far harder than a weak quarter does.
Defined Tuesday, August 25, 2026 -
hawkish
A central banker is hawkish when they treat rising prices as the bigger danger and are willing to keep interest rates high, or raise them, to bring inflation down, even at the cost of slower growth and weaker hiring.
Defined Friday, August 28, 2026 -
inflation expectations
Inflation expectations are what investors collectively guess prices will do over the coming years, and they matter because long term interest rates, including the one on your mortgage, are set by that guess about the future rather than by the inflation rate being reported today.
Defined Thursday, September 24, 2026 -
market breadth
Market breadth is the count of how many stocks are actually rising versus falling on a given day, and it matters because an index can close higher on narrow breadth when a few giant companies climb while most companies fall, which is exactly what happened today.
Defined Thursday, August 27, 2026 -
PCE price index
The PCE price index, short for personal consumption expenditures, is the inflation measure the Federal Reserve actually uses when deciding whether to raise or lower interest rates, and it differs from the better known Consumer Price Index mainly because it adjusts for people substituting cheaper goods when prices rise. The August reading lands Wednesday morning, with economists expecting a 0.4% monthly increase and 0.3% for the core measure, which strips out food and energy to show the underlying trend, and it is the single biggest input into whether the Fed hikes again on October 28.
Defined Tuesday, September 29, 2026 -
prices paid index
The prices paid index is the part of a monthly survey of factory purchasing managers that asks only whether their input costs went up or down, so a reading far above 50 means most factories are paying more for materials than they did last month and are likely to pass some of that on to customers.
Defined Thursday, October 1, 2026 -
Producer Price Index
The Producer Price Index measures what businesses charge each other for goods and services before anything reaches a store shelf, so it often signals where the prices you pay are heading a month or two later.
Defined Thursday, September 10, 2026 -
risk premium
A risk premium is the extra amount buyers will pay today for something because it might become scarce or dangerous to obtain later, which is why the price of oil can climb sharply even while exactly the same number of barrels is still being delivered.
Defined Monday, September 7, 2026 -
rotation
Rotation is when investors sell one group of stocks and buy another on the same day rather than leaving the market altogether, which is what happened when money moved from chipmakers into banks and left the Dow up while the Nasdaq fell.
Defined Monday, August 24, 2026 -
run rate
A run rate is what a company's sales would add up to over a full year if they simply stayed where they are right now, so it is a projection stretched out from one recent month or quarter rather than money the company has actually collected over twelve months, which is why a run rate can be revised by tens of billions overnight without the company having lost a single customer.
Defined Thursday, October 8, 2026 -
share buyback
A share buyback is when a company spends its own cash purchasing its own stock on the open market, which leaves fewer shares outstanding so each remaining share represents a slightly larger slice of the company, and it is why Nvidia's stock rose on a day when almost nothing else did.
Defined Monday, September 28, 2026 -
strategic reserve
A strategic reserve is a government-owned stockpile of oil or fuel held for emergencies, and when governments announce they will sell some of it, prices usually fall straight away because traders price in the extra supply before a single barrel is delivered.
Defined Tuesday, October 6, 2026 -
supply shock
A supply shock is a sudden loss of the ability to produce something, such as oil facilities being knocked offline, which pushes prices up even though nobody wanted more of it, and it is harder for a central bank to fix than ordinary inflation because raising interest rates cannot put the missing barrels back.
Defined Tuesday, September 8, 2026 -
term premium
The term premium is the extra yield investors demand for lending money for ten or thirty years instead of a few months, compensation for the risk that inflation or rates will move against them over that long stretch, and it is the reason long-term borrowing costs like mortgages can rise even when the Fed has not moved.
Defined Tuesday, September 15, 2026 -
Treasury buyback
A Treasury buyback is when the US government spends cash to repurchase bonds it has already issued from investors in the open market, which adds a buyer to that market and pushes bond prices up and yields down.
Defined Wednesday, August 19, 2026 -
Yield curve
The yield curve is the set of interest rates the US government pays to borrow money for different lengths of time, from a few months out to 30 years, and it matters because the Federal Reserve controls the short end of it while bond investors set the long end that drives mortgage rates.
Defined Friday, October 2, 2026