securities

A cap is a set limit on some form of income, interest, fees, loan, or benefit. Examples of caps:

Capital gains refers to profits gained from the sale of capital assets. Almost everything someone owns and uses for personal or investment purposes is a capital asset. This includes a home, personal-use items like household furnishings, vehicles, or intangibles such as stocks or bonds held as investments.

Capital stock, also known as authorized stock, refers to all common stock and preferred stock a corporation is legally allowed to issue.

Capitalization has different meanings, referring to the allocation of costs in tax and accounting contexts and to capital structures in the corporate context.

Carbon offsets are credits representing the removal of one ton of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These offsets are obtainable through activities such as planting trees or carbon capture that legally offset the amount of carbon that a polluting entity has emitted.

Chattel mortgage is an antiquated term for a mortgage on movable personal property (“chattel”), such as machinery or a vehicle (as opposed to real estate), where the lender holds an interest in the property as security/collateral for the loan.

Chattel paper is a legal document that records a monetary obligation from one party to another and a security interest used in secured transactions to sell property on credit while retaining some interest in the property. (See: UCC § 9-102)

Churn, in the context of stock trading, means making numerous risky and excessive transactions to generate high commissions against the customer's character of account and objectives by a broker. 

See: Churning

[Last reviewed in December of 2021 by the Wex Definitions Team]

Churning, which is also referred to as excessive trading, is the frequent buying and selling of securities by a stock broker using a customer’s account with the main purpose of promoting the broker’s personal gains, such as generating commission, instead of promoting the customer’s primary investment goals.

The classical theory of insider trading is a form of insider trading where a corporate insider—i.e.