Financial terms, defined plainly

Each entry opens with a short, quotable definition, adds the depth that matters, and links the live Tradergy page where the term does its work. Definitions are anchored to primary authorities such as the RBA, the ABS and Moneysmart.

Which of these terms someone actually defines

The terms below fall into two groups, and knowing which group a word is in changes how much weight its definition can carry. Some have an institution that fixes their meaning. The Reserve Bank of Australia sets and publishes the cash rate, so what the cash rate is, is whatever the Reserve Bank says it is. The Australian Bureau of Statistics compiles the consumer price index, so the basket, the weights and the method are the Bureau’s to define and to change.

Others have nobody. A spot rate, a cross rate and a mid-market rate are conventions of the wholesale currency market. No body issues them, no standard fixes them, and no register records what they mean. They can be described accurately, and this glossary does, but the description rests on consistent usage rather than on an instrument anybody can cite.

A third case is the one that catches people out, because the word looks national and is not. Stamp duty is not one Australian tax. Each state and territory levies its own transfer duty under its own Act, with its own scale, its own concessions and its own revenue office issuing the assessment, so a definition that does not name a jurisdiction is incomplete by construction. The same is true in a smaller way of terms that describe an Australian arrangement with no counterpart elsewhere, which is why an entry here sometimes has to say where a word does not travel.

Every entry therefore names the authority behind it where one exists, and says plainly where none does. That is the difference between a definition you can rely on in an argument and one that is simply how the term is generally used.