Glossary

Click on a letter to browse the terms associated with it.

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Odd lot	A trading order for less than 100 shares of stock. Compare round lot.
Offer	Indicates a willingness to sell at a given price.
Offset	Elimination of a current long or short position by making an opposite transaction
Omnibus account	An account carried by one futures commission merchant with another futures commission merchant in which the transactions of two or more persons are combined and carried in the name of the originating broker, rather than designated separately.
Open contracts	Contracts which have been bought or sold without the transaction having been completed by subsequent sale or purchase, or by making or taking actual delivery of the financial instrument or physical commodity.
Open interest	The total number of futures contracts traded in a given commodity that have not yet been liquidated either by an offsetting futures transaction or by delivery
Open order	An order to a broker that is good until it is canceled or executed.
Open-Outcry	The method of trading used at futures exchanges, typically involving calling out the specific details of a buy or sell order, so that the information is available to all traders.
Opening price	The range of prices at which the first bids and offers were made or first transactions were completed
Option	The right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an underlying futures contract
Option premium	The option price.
Option price	Also called the option premium, the price paid by the buyer of the options contract for the right to buy or sell a security at a specified price in the future.
Option seller	Also called the option writer, the party who grants a right to trade a security at a given price in the future.
Option writer	Option seller
Off-shore	The operations of a financial institution which although physically located in a country, has little connection with that country's financial systems. In certain countries a bank is not permitted to do business in the domestic market but only with other foreign banks. This is known as an off shore banking unit.
Overnight limit	Net long or short position in one or more currencies that a dealer can carry over into the next dealing day. Passing the book to other bank dealing rooms in the next trading time zone reduces the need for dealers to maintain these unmonitored exposures.
Overnight	A deal from today until the next business day.
Out-of-the-Money	A put option with a strike price lower than the underlying futures price, or a call option with a strike price higher than the underlying futures price