The OCC is the acronym for Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. This independent bureau falls under the United States Department of the Treasury. The U.S. President appoints an individual to serve as Comptroller of the agency for a term of five years. The American Senate must approve this appointment. The Comptroller serves as one of the directors of [...]

OFR is an abbreviation and stands for the Office of Financial Research. This government organization that has its headquarter in the Treasury Building works to supply information in support of the Financial Stability Oversight Council. The OFR strives to encourage financial stability throughout the United States. They do this by scanning throughout the American financial system in order to find, [...]

The Office of Price Administration was a Federal agency created under the Office for Emergency Management within the U.S. Federal government. It was established by Executive Order number 8875 back on August 28th of 1941. The purposes of this OPA were initially to help keep a reign on the prices of rents and essential goods following the beginning of the [...]

Offshore accounts are accounts that you have in a bank that is located in another country. The term originally came from banks and accounts that were found in the Channel Islands, which were literally off shore from Great Britain. Interestingly enough, the majority of offshore banks and offshore accounts are still found on islands to this day. Individuals and businesses [...]

Offshore Banking is a means of banking by keeping your funds in a bank that is outside of the country in which you primarily reside, or literally “offshore.” These days it has acquired a negative connotation consistent with money laundering, criminal activities, or tax evasion. Yet none of these mental pictures are accurate any longer. All an offshore bank account [...]

Offshore Bonds are sometimes called offshore investment bonds. These investment vehicles allow individuals to gain control over what point they pay tax, to whom they will pay such tax, and how much they will ultimately pay in the end. These types of bonds are offered internationally from some of the mega global multinational life insurance firms like Britain’s Old Mutual [...]

Oil Sands prove to be a unique mixture of water, sand, clay, and bitumen. They exist in a few places throughout the globe, such as Canada, Russia, the United States, Kazakstan, and Venezuela. Bitumen is actually a form of oil which is so heavy (or thick) that it can neither be pumped out or flow naturally on its own. This [...]

Oil Shale, sometimes called shale oil, refers to an unconventional form of oil that exists in shale formations. This shale oil can be used to describe two separate forms of oil. The first is crude oil which has become trapped within shale formations. The second refers to the more traditionally accepted definition. This is oil which the companies extract out [...]

An oligopoly represents a type of market where only a couple of companies dominate the majority of market share. As only a few firms share markets between them, they are called highly concentrated. Even though just several firms are dominant, numerous smaller companies can also compete in such a market. Major national airline carriers like British Airways and KLM-Air France [...]

OPEC is the globally famous acronym for the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. This permanently standing and frequently meeting intergovernmental entity arose over fifty years ago at the Baghdad Conference held back from September 10th through the 14th of 1960. Founding meeting nations at the time were Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and Venezuela. These five original Founding Members [...]

The OPEC Fund for International Development, or OFID, proves to be the developing world assisting, intergovernmental development financing organization. The member states of OPEC organized this group in 1976. They actually conceived of the idea while they were at a meeting in Algiers, Algeria in March of 1975. The Solemn Declaration of the Conference stated that it “reaffirmed the natural [...]

Open Market Operations are also called by their acronym OMO. These describe both the purchasing and selling of open market-based government securities. The Federal Reserve central bank of the United States has a committee which engages in these transactions with the goal of expanding or contracting the total quantity of money flowing through the banking system. When the Fed buys [...]

Operating Cash Flow is also known by its abbreviated acronym OCF. It refers to a metric for the quantity of cash which a corporation or company’s typical daily business operations produce. As such, it provides a good insight into a firm’s ability to generate enough cash flow in order to either grow or at the very least maintain its existing [...]

In the world of business and corporations, operating expenses is the term that pertains to the continuous costs of running a business. This makes operating expenses the expenses for everything happening behind the scenes. Such operating costs include any expenses incurred for the literal operation of the business. You occasionally see the words operating expenses written as OPEX. This is [...]

Option spreads are option combinations which have traders combining two different options contracts with varied strikes but identical expiration dates. They do this in a strategy to limit their overall risk. The idea behind these option spreads is relatively simple, but the possible effects of some spread constructs can become slightly more complicated. Reducing the concept of option spreads to [...]

Options are contracts on stocks, indexes, currencies, commodities, or debt instruments. There are two principle types. These are call options and put options. Call options give holders the ability to purchase a set amount of the underlying instrument for a specific price in a certain amount of time. This specific price is known as the strike price. Put options grant [...]

As part of the Dodd-Frank Act that Congress passed following the Financial Crisis and Great Recession of 2008, they accepted that there are financial firms that will ultimately fail. This is despite the fact that the new regulatory and supervisory framework scrutinizes banks and non banking financial entities more carefully than ever before now. In the crisis and the years [...]

Origination fees are also known as activation fees. These are the costs pertaining to setting up an account with a mortgage broker, bank, or other firm that will go through the tasks of collecting and processing all documents and requirements for getting a loan, in particular a mortgage on a house. These origination fees are generally amounts that are pre [...]

The OTC Bulletin Board (OTCBB) proves to be a service for electronic trading that the NASD National Association of Securities Dealers maintains and provides to investors and dealers. It delivers live quotes on volume and pricing data to both investors and traders on stocks which trade OTC over the counter. Every company which is listed on this backwater exchange has [...]

OTC is the acronym for Over the Counter. In the business and financial world, Over the Counter trading is also known as trading off of the exchange. Such OTC trading goes on when financial instruments of various kinds, including stocks, commodities, bonds, or derivatives, are traded literally between the buying and selling party themselves, without having an exchange in the [...]

An Overdraft refers to the extension of credit where a bank or other lending institution allows for debits to be paid after an account has hit zero dollars. Thanks to these overdrafts, individuals are able to keep drawing down the account value below zero, although there is no money left in it or an insufficient amount to resolve the withdrawal. [...]

Oversight is a critical regulatory concept. Thanks to the Congressional act the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, independent oversight became a major new requirement for occupations pertaining to accounting at public companies. This act and trend in government regulating led to the creation of the PCAOB. PCAOB stands for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. This organization proves to be a [...]

Owner Financing refers to the seller carrying all or part of the house sale purchase price. The exception is the amount which the buyer offers by way of down payment. The seller provides the actual financing in this type of a home sale transaction. It is not important if the property already carried a loan when the transaction occurred. There [...]