finance Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and Academic discipline, discipline of money, currency, assets and Liability (financial accounting), liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business administration, Business Admin ...

, a basket is a weighted group (a

linear combination In mathematics, a linear combination or superposition is an Expression (mathematics), expression constructed from a Set (mathematics), set of terms by multiplying each term by a constant and adding the results (e.g. a linear combination of ''x'' a ...

) of several

financial instrument Financial instruments are monetary contracts between parties. They can be created, traded, modified and settled. They can be cash (currency), evidence of an ownership, interest in an entity or a contractual right to receive or deliver in the form ...

s. The purpose could be for example simultaneous buying or selling, for example during program trading. Baskets can be traded by buying the shares separately or through a professionally negotiated transaction through a broker. People trade in baskets to arbitrage with the futures traded on the index. Baskets are also used to denote a collection of currencies, such as the ECU in the past. Certain specific specialized "baskets": * A

stock market index In finance, a stock index, or stock market index, is an Index (economics), index that measures the performance of a stock market, or of a subset of a stock market. It helps investors compare current stock price levels with past prices to calcul ...

is a basket for all the securities in a particular exchange. * A market basket is a basket for all the securities on a particular market. * A combination of individual assets, used as an underlying of a basket option.

References

Securities (finance) {{finance-stub

See also

References