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 fossil record of a legal negotiation between legal eagles, bears a striking similarity to a playground argument. It will start as a broad, wide-ranging, harangue; each side adopting fundamentally opposed positions and summoning quiet outrage that their perspective is not accepted.
As the absurdity of either side’s position becomes apparent each follows the same slow, careful process of reversing, the way one descends a rickety ladder, at the bottom of which the debate has resolves into petulant snickering: correcting split infinitives, interposing redundancies, clarifying the already plain, helpfully particularising the general and addending for the the satisfaction of having the last word.
Both sides can walk away, declaring victory, 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 Template: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.