Glossary
The words we use, in plain English
Every term on Ownsight, explained without jargon.
- 1-in-100 bad day
- A fall that was exceeded on only 1 in every 100 days in the past 5 years. Not a limit: bigger falls happened, and can happen again.
- Accumulating and distributing
- Two versions of the same fund. A distributing fund pays its income out; an accumulating fund reinvests it inside the fund, so the unit price rises instead.
- Average on bad days
- The average fall on those worst 1-in-100 days.
- Bonds and gilts
- Loans to governments or companies that pay interest. Gilts are bonds issued by the UK government.
- Candlestick
- A chart bar for one day, week or month: the box runs from the opening to the closing price and the thin lines reach the highest and lowest prices. Green means it closed higher than it opened.
- Concentration
- How much of your money depends on a small number of companies. We show it as 'like holding N equal companies': the lower N is, the more a few companies drive your results.
- Correlation
- How closely two things moved together, from -1 (opposite) through 0 (unrelated) to 1 (always together).
- Currency exposure
- Assets priced in another currency change in pound value when exchange rates move, even if their own price stays the same.
- Demo data
- Data assembled for this preview from public sources. Close to reality but not checked for every fund and date.
- Distribution
- Money a fund pays out to its holders, from the dividends and interest it receives.
- Dividend
- A share of a company's profits paid to its shareholders.
- Emerging markets
- Countries whose economies and stock markets are still developing, such as China, India and Brazil.
- ETF
- Exchange-traded fund: a fund whose units trade on a stock exchange like a share.
- Hedged fund
- A fund that uses contracts to cancel out most of the effect of exchange-rate movements.
- Index
- A list of companies or bonds chosen by a published rule, such as the largest companies in developed countries, used to describe a market. An index itself can't be held; funds track them.
- Largest fall from a high
- The biggest drop from a previous peak to a later low (sometimes called drawdown).
- Look-through
- Seeing past a fund's name to the companies, bonds and other assets it holds, and how much of each.
- Monte Carlo simulation
- Running thousands of made-up months that follow the patterns seen in real prices, to see how wide the range of outcomes is.
- Ongoing charge (OCF)
- The yearly cost of running a fund, taken from the fund's value as a percentage. It's separate from any platform or dealing fees.
- Overlap
- When the same company sits inside more than one of your funds, or inside a fund and in a share you hold directly. Your total exposure to it is the sum of all those pieces.
- Risk contribution
- How much of a portfolio's ups and downs come from one holding. It depends on the holding's size, how much it moves and how it moves with everything else.
- Sensitivity
- How much a portfolio has tended to move when something else moved, such as global shares, oil or the pound. Past relationships, which can change.
- Size and value factors
- Two well-studied patterns in share prices (Fama and French): smaller versus larger companies, and 'value' (cheaper) versus 'growth' companies.
- Typical daily move
- How much the portfolio's value usually changed in a day, up or down (one standard deviation of daily returns).
- Volatility-scaled estimate
- Past daily moves resized to how lively markets are right now, so a calm period gives smaller figures and a stormy one larger. Also called filtered historical simulation.
- Volume
- How many units or shares changed hands in that day, week or month.