Dematerialised securities

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

“Dematerialised” securities or financial instruments — AKA book-entry securities, because they only exist as entries in the books and records of a depositary organisation and don’t have other corporeal form as “res extensa” — are those which have swallowed the blue pill, jacked themselves into the Matrix, and gone digital, no longer having earthly existence as a security printed, paper “thing”.

That is, in this day and age, pretty much all of them.

See also

• Bearer instrument