35 terms

Dictionary: U

U-6 underemployment rate: The broadest published measure of labour underutilisation, adding discouraged workers, others marginally attached to the workforce, and part-timers who want full-time work.
UCITS: A European regulatory framework for retail funds that sets diversification, liquidity, leverage and disclosure rules, and allows a fund authorised in one member state to be sold across the bloc.
UK capital gains tax on trading: United Kingdom: gains on shares and most assets are taxed as capital gains above an annual exempt amount, using pooled section 104 cost rather than individual lots.
UK spread betting tax treatment: United Kingdom: spread betting profits are generally free of capital gains tax and stamp duty because the bets are treated as gambling, and losses are correspondingly not relievable.
Ulcer index: A risk measure combining the depth and the duration of drawdowns, built to reflect how uncomfortable a record actually was to live through.
Ultimate Oscillator: Welles Wilder's oscillator that blends buying pressure measured over three different lookback periods into a single weighted reading.
Ultra Treasury bond futures: A CBOT contract deliverable only into Treasury bonds with 25 or more years remaining, giving cleaner exposure to the true long end than ZB.
Unbonding period: The waiting time between requesting your staked coins back and being able to move or sell them.
Uncovered interest parity: The theory that a high-yielding currency should weaken by enough to cancel its interest advantage; it consistently fails in the data, which is why carry trades exist.
Undefined risk: A position with no long option capping its loss, so the worst case is limited only by how far the underlying can move.
Underfitting: A model too simple to capture the real structure in the data, producing weak results everywhere rather than just out of sample.
Undertrading: Taking too few of your qualifying setups, or sizing far below plan, so a working edge is never expressed.
Underwater curve: A plot of how far below the high-water mark the account sits at every point, showing depth and duration of every decline at once.
Underwriter: The investment bank or group of banks that prices an offering, buys the shares from the issuer, and distributes them to investors for a fee.
Unemployment rate: The share of the labor force actively looking for work but not employed, reported monthly with NFP.
Unit economics: The revenue and cost associated with a single customer or a single unit sold, used to judge whether growth creates or destroys value.
Unit labour costs (ULC): The labour cost of producing one unit of output, equal to compensation growth minus productivity growth; the cleanest link between wages and inflation.
Unit root: A property of a series where shocks never decay, so the level wanders permanently. A series with a unit root is a random walk plus possible drift.
Unit sizing: Treating one standard risk amount as a single unit so trades, pyramids and limits can be counted rather than calculated.
Units: Position size expressed directly as a number of base-currency units rather than as lots, which removes the guesswork from risk sizing.
Universe construction: Deciding which instruments a strategy is allowed to trade on each historical date, using only information available on that date.
Unlevered free cash flow: Cash flow available to all funders before any interest is paid, used in discounted cash flow models that value the whole enterprise rather than the equity.
Unsettled funds: Proceeds from a sale that have not yet completed settlement, usable for new purchases in a cash account but not for withdrawal or immediate resale.
Unsupervised learning: Finding structure in data without labels: clustering instruments, reducing dimensions, or detecting regimes. Useful for organising a problem, rarely a strategy on its own.
Unusual options activity: Option volume far above a contract's normal level or its open interest, promoted as a signal of informed trading and usually explainable more mundanely.
Unwind: Closing an existing options position, usually a multi-leg one, by trading the opposite package rather than letting it expire.
Uplisting: A move from over-the-counter markets to a national exchange such as Nasdaq or the NYSE, which requires meeting the exchange's listing standards.
Upper shadow: The thin line above a candle body, marking how far price rose before sellers pushed it back down.
Upthrust: A brief push above the ceiling of a distribution range that fails and falls back inside, trapping breakout buyers.
US retail forex leverage limits: The US rules setting a minimum security deposit of 2% on major currency pairs and 5% on the rest, equivalent to caps of about 50:1 and 20:1 for retail forex accounts.
Use of proceeds: The prospectus section stating what the company intends to do with money raised, and the fastest read on whether an offering creates or destroys per-share value.
Used margin: The total collateral currently tied up by open positions, equal to the sum of each position's margin requirement, and unavailable for anything else until they close.
Utilisation rate: The share of a lending pool's deposits currently borrowed. It drives interest rates and determines whether depositors can actually withdraw.
Utilization rate: The share of a stock's lendable inventory that is currently out on loan, the cleanest live gauge of how tight the borrow is.
UTXO: An accounting model where a wallet holds discrete unspent chunks of coin rather than a single running balance.

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