Mark-up

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A mark-up (or mark-down) is a dealer’s way of making money: the equivalent in a principal arrangement to commission paid to an agent.

Not to be confused with a legal mark-up, an impenetrable melange of passives, passive-aggressives, redundancies, flannel and non-sequiturs injected into a perfectly sensible contract by a perfectly tedious attorney. The sheer inscrutability of one’s mark-up is a criteria for inhouse legal team of the year.

Also not to be confused with a a mark-up language which is a way of coding ordinary text in a way that machines can understand. This works quite well sometimes: The internet runs on hypertext mark-up language — “html”— an acquired taste but one which any fule can understand with a little patience; the fabulous {{MediaWiki}} runs on [[wiki mark-up]], which even dear old five-thumbed Jolly Contrarian can understand — but other adventures have been less successful. There are lawyers at Linklaters who still can’t communicate unemotionally, having coded the entirety of the 2011 Equity Derivatives Definitions— remember those? No? — in Financial products Markup Language.

See also

• Inhouse legal team of the year