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Margin (finance)

type of financial collateral used to cover credit risk

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ625360 ↗
Source-derived summary

In finance, margin is the collateral that a holder of a financial instrument has to deposit with a counterparty (most often a broker or an exchange) to cover some or all of the credit risk the holder poses for the counterparty. This risk can arise if the holder has done any of the following:

Borrowed cash from the counterparty to buy financial instruments,

Borrowed financial instruments to sell them short,

Entered into a derivative contract.

The collateral for a margin account can be the cash deposited in the account or securities provided, and represents the funds available to the account holder for further share trading. On United States futures exchanges, margins were formerly called performance bonds. Most of the exchanges today use SPAN ("Standard Portfolio Analysis of Risk") methodology, which was developed by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 1988, for calculating margins for options and futures.

Margin account

A margin account is a loan account with a broker which can be used for share trading. The funds available under the margin loan are determined by the broker based on the securities owned and provided by the trader, which act as collateral for the loan. The broker usually has the right to change the percentage of the value of each security it will allow toward further advances to the trader, and may consequently make a margin call if the balance available falls below the amount actually utilised. In any event, the broker will usually charge interest and other fees on the amount drawn on the margin account.

If the cash balance of a margin account is negative, the amount is owed to the broker, and usually attracts interest.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Margin (finance)” as type of financial collateral used to cover credit risk. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1988—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Margin, finance and type can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as type of financial collateral used to cover credit risk. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q625360. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988.

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The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Margin (finance)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.