The CHIPS and Science Act, signed in August 2022, set aside $52.7 billion for US semiconductors, including $39 billion in manufacturing incentives run by the Commerce Department’s CHIPS Program Office. Those incentives pay for new fabs, packaging plants and suppliers of wafers, gases and equipment, mostly as direct grants, sometimes with loans. Most of the big awards were finalized in the last months of the Biden administration. The Trump administration kept the programme but changed how it works, most visibly by turning Intel’s grants into a government shareholding.

A credit spread is the extra yield a company pays to borrow compared with the US government for the same length of time. If a five-year Treasury yields 4 percent and a company’s five-year bond yields 5.5 percent, the spread is 1.5 percentage points, or 150 basis points (one basis point is 0.01 point). That gap is the market’s price for the chance the company won’t pay back, plus a bit for being harder to sell than a Treasury.

Market breadth measures how many stocks are taking part in a move. An index like the S&P 500 is weighted by market value, so a handful of giant companies can push it to a record while most of its members go nowhere or fall. Breadth indicators strip the weighting out. They count stocks: how many rose, how many fell, how many hit new highs, how many sit above a moving average.

Short interest is the number of a company’s shares that have been sold short and not yet bought back. A short seller borrows shares, sells them, and hopes to buy them back later at a lower price before returning them to the lender. Until that buyback happens, the position is open, and it shows up in the short interest count. Investors watch the figure for two reasons. It tells you how many professional skeptics are betting against a stock.

The yield curve plots the interest rates on US Treasury debt from the shortest maturities (a few weeks) out to 30 years. Normally it slopes upward: lenders want more to tie money up for longer. When short-term rates rise above long-term ones, the curve is “inverted”, and that has happened before every US recession since the late 1960s. That record made inversion the most quoted recession signal in finance. Then the curve stayed inverted for more than two years from 2022 to 2024 and, as of October 2026, no recession has followed.

Wall Street runs on two languages. One is formal: financial statements, analyst reports, SEC filings. The other is the fast shorthand traders use when they talk about what is actually happening in the market. A headline might say a company “delivered a strong print but the stock faded as investors digested cautious guidance.” That sounds complicated. It means the reported numbers were good, the stock went up at first, and then investors focused on weaker forward expectations and the price came back down.

A working reference for the vocabulary of financial markets — organized by domain, not alphabetically. Definitions are written for investors, analysts, financial journalists, and informed participants who need precision without the padding of a textbook. Market Structure Equity Ownership interest in a company, represented by shares of stock. Equity holders are residual claimants — they receive what remains after all creditors and obligations are satisfied. Common equity carries voting rights; preferred equity has priority in distributions but typically limited voting power.