Mark-up
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Brokerage Anatomy™
 Launch party for the 2011 Equity Derivatives Definitions
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Broker’s mark-up
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.
Legal mark-up
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.
Legal Mark up, being the written fossil record of a legal negotiation, a striking similarity with a schoolyard argument, or 1 tween 12-year old siblings. It will start as a broad, wide-ranging, harangue, besides adopting fundamentally opposed positions and summoning quiet outrage that their perspective is not accepted. As the absurdity of either sides position becomes apparent there is a slow careful process of reversing comet the way one 1AX down a rickety ladder on the side of a hill, and at the end resolves into to Petra learnt snickering comma correcting split infinitives and adding celery for the the main purpose of having the last word. Both sides walk away declaring at a victory and silently resenting the disappointing but entirely pragmatic middle ground they have found.
Mark-up language
Also not to be confused with 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.