finance Finance is the study and discipline of money, currency and capital assets. It is related to, but not synonymous with economics, the study of production, distribution, and consumption of money, assets, goods and services (the discipline of fina ...

, a basket is a weighted group (a linear combination) 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 Program trading is a type of trading in securities, usually consisting of baskets of fifteen stocks or more that are executed by a computer program simultaneously based on predetermined conditions. Program trading is often used by hedge funds an ...

. Certain specific specialized "baskets": * A

stock market index In finance, a stock index, or stock market index, is an index that measures a stock market, or a subset of the stock market, that helps investors compare current stock price levels with past prices to calculate market performance. Two of the ...

is a basket for all the securities in a particular exchange. * A

market basket A market basket or commodity bundle is a fixed list of items, in given proportions. Its most common use is to track the progress of inflation in an economy or specific market. That is, to measure the changes in the value of money over time. A ...

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

basket option A basket option is a financial derivative, more specifically an exotic option, whose underlying is a weighted sum or average of different assets that have been grouped together in a basket. A basket option is similar to an index option, where a nu ...

See also