Industry Terms You Can't Stand

  • “I think, the FED…”

  • government coffers

  • core-inflation

  • Grexit/ Graccident/ Greefault/ if sinners saw the light/…

  • a storm is brewing/ steer clear of stormy seas

  • customer-commission balance

“Identify”

You, know, how a man can “identify” as a woman, or a white person can “identify” as black. (Rachel Dolezal)

May not be an industry term, but wtf does “well-educated” mean? That you’re a pompous ass? Seems to imply formal education and those that use the relative term actually obtained their limited knowledge base only from the classroom. I find the use of the term to be highly correlated with low processing power.

Critical thinker >>> “Well-educated”

From what industry does that term come?

Since this thread was brought back to life by Greenman’s reference to professional poseur Rachel Dolezal, I will turn the conversation back to the finance industry by providing some more sickening words and phrases that need to be killed:

“Seasoned”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other”

“Bottom-up”

“Benchmark agnostic”

“Not a lot of coverage by Wall Street analysts”

Saying that a strategy is “stinking it up as of late”

“Mean Variance Optimization”

“Black Box” (when what they are talking about, in fact, is not really the technical definition of a black box algorithm)

Showing the last slide of a presentation for 2 seconds with Compliance disclosures and making some crack about “this is the fine print I’m required to show you by my Compliance department”

Ad hoc

and also

hard stop

out of bandwidth

High Level

German equivalent of contribution margin.

Germans like to impose it on foreigners as if it were some sacred cow only the locals can possibly understand but now that I know all possible levels ot it, I want to laugh out loud))).

I generally dislike when local variations of Anglo-Saxon terms, no matter the country, are treated like some very big mistery. Extremely detrimental to productive work.

Geez, almost threw up reading this thread!

So I guess I’m weird, because I very deliberately speak in plain English without using these phrases. Especially when working internationally, most people will have no clue what you are saying if you use this strange type of language.

True story. Our US HR did a video conference with the Asian employees. After 90 minutes of this babble it ends, HR hangs up, all the Asians turn to me and ask “what was that about??”. Hell, I could barely even understand.

Jargon used properly is actually very nice. When the precision of the jargon exactly captures what’s being communicated, it’s great.

Jargon used because it sounds like you’re supposed to say it is annoying.

Jargon used improperly is God-awful.

“Let’s table this for now.”

Inside baseball

Poke the sleeping bear

Above board

I recently had the misfortune of having to attend some meetings with people that worked in a function callin themselves “Change”

They kept uttering the phrase “We’ll take that one back to the ranch” which from context appeared to mean “Despite working in the industry, we know absolutely nothing about Investment Management so we’ll need to go back to our desks and have multiple meetings and spend a week drawing up process maps before coming back to you in the next meeting still as clueless as we are now”

Well, Bob, I see that you’re finally getting the hang of this.

I actuality like poke the bear! I don’t get to use it enough.

“get me another coffee…”

Compliance

Anti money laundering

Managing strategic change

Are you a crook?

You mean croc?

Align

Drive change/results (especiaily on a linkedin profile)


I use “P&L” and “Income Statement” somewhat interechangibly but hadn’t thought about why until now. I think I would say " P&L impact" because it is easier to say than “Income Statement impact” (try saying that ten times!). But I would always use “Income Statement” in the context of “Where is it on the Income Statement?” or “Are you ready to review the Income Statement”.


Absolutely stupid saying.