| Last Dealing Day | |
| The last day in the contract month in which a trader may deal in the product. Note that not only can the last dealing day be different for some spread bets but so can the actual time of expiry. | |
| Leverage | |
| The degree to which an investor or business uses borrowed money. Leverage (or Gearing) is when an investor only needs to put up a small proportion of the value of an asset in order to buy the asset in question. spread trading is a leveraged product. Leveraged investments are riskier than other types of investment. In spreadbetting, traders are highly leveraged because they put up a margin on the trade and their spread bet firm effectively lends them the rest. See gearing. | |
| LIBID | |
| London Inter Bank Bid Rate. The rate that one bank pays to another for a deposit. | |
| London Inter-bank Offered Rate is the rate at which banks borrow funds from each other. As such the 'London Inter Bank Offer Rate' - The rate that one bank charges to another for lending money. LIBOR is the lending rate for all major currencies up to one-year set at 11am each day by the British Bankers Association. It is also used as a benchmark for price derivatives and other market transactions. In other words, LIBOR (i.e. London inter-bank offered rate) is a short-term interest rate set by the Bank of England often used by spread betting firms as a base for calculating finance charges for futures style bets. |
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| LIFFE | |
| London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange. The three largest UK futures markets. Acquired by Euronext in 2001. | |
| Limited loss accounts | |
| In financial spread betting these are accounts where you can't lose more money than the amount invested. In sports, firms usually allow clients to bet with smaller stakes - down to say a penny a run, in cricket - and also impose stop-losses on all markets to protect clients from ending losing substantially more than their original stake. | |
| Limit order | |
| A limit order is an automatic order set to close out a current open position should that limit price set be reached. When spread trading limit orders allow you to book profits at a certain price. The opposite of a Limit Order is a Stop Loss. A limit order is an order to do a trade, either to buy or sell, when the price for the product you are interested in hits a certain price. A limit order is often placed when you want to do a trade but at a better price than the current quote (the order specifies a 'no worse than' price to buy or sell). For example, if the FTSE 100 spread bet price is quoted as 5700 - 5701 but you believe that the market will correct before rallying again, you could place a limit order to buy if the price falls to 5500. | |
| Limit price move, Limit Up or Limit Down | |
| When an exchange imposes either a floor ora ceiling on a security price, closes or suspends trading in order to prevent extreme changes in price. For some futures contracts the exchanges specify the maximum amount by which a price can change in one day. A market which has increased by this amount is Limit up. This then is known as locked limit up which means no more buying can take place for that day. Limit down is the opposite. If a price is locked limit up or down you can still trade the opposite side. i.e. sell if limit up or buy if limit down. | |
| Limit up | |
| Continental European markets will suspend shares if the rise too high (go limit up), or fall too far (limit down). As such a limit up is when a financial market has risen to a level where, temporarily, no further buy orders are permitted. | |
| Linked order | |
| Two orders placed against the same trade, for example a stop loss and a limit-sell on a long position. If one order is executed the other one will automatically be cancelled. Also known as 'One Cancels Other'. | |
| Listed company | |
| A company whose shares have been listed and are dealt on the Stock Exchange. When a company's shares are listed on a stock exchange it is referred to as a listing. | |
| Liquid/illiquid market | |
| Liquidity is the phrase used to describe a stock or security whose shares trade in very large volumes and are therefore easy to buy at the current price. The opposite of liquidity is Illiquidity. A liquid market has enough volume of two-way business for trading to occur without moving prices unduly. It will normally have narrow bid-offer spreads. An illiquid market normally does not have enough volume of two-way business for trading so a small amount of business results in disproportionate price movements. It will normally have wide bid-offer spreads. Liquid stocks are cheaper to trade due to tighter bid-offer spreads - most shares traded on an index fall in this category. The bigger the volume of trading in a particular asset or share, the higher its liquidity | |
| Liquidation | |
| The conversion of assets into cash. | |
| Liquidity | |
| Proportion of an investment fund held in cash. The ability of an asset to be converted into cash quickly and without any price discount. In spread betting and share dealing, it refers to how easy it will to trade a share. A stock's liquidity mainly relies on the number of shares available to the public (i.e. on free float) and the market capitalization of the company. | |
| Loan stock | |
| Stock bearing a fixed rate of interest. Unlike debenture stock it need not be secured by assets. | |
| London Stock Exchange | |
| UK Share market. | |
| Longs | |
| When used in connection with stocks it refers to long-dated stocks with maturity dates of fifteen years and more. | |
| Long Bond | |
| Another name for the US 30 year bond. | |
| Long, going long, taking a long position | |
| Holder of a particularly large line of stock, usually convinced the price will go up. Having an 'up bet' in a market. When you go Long (or Buy) this means you are buying a security (or taking a long position) with the expectation that it is going to rise in price. A strategy of buying a share, spread bet or other derivative in the belief that the price, or the price of the underlying share, will increase. By going long, you hope to sell the share, spread bet or derivative at a higher price than you bought at - and, therefore, make a profit. | |
| Long bond | |
| another term for the US 20-year government bonds. | |
| Long gilt | |
| another term for the UK 10-year government bonds. | |
| Long term bet | |
| In finance this equals futures bet to be settled at the end of a 3-month period. In sports this could cover say the length of the football season or a cricket test series. | |
