What assets does the term “security” encompass?
"A good reference to what encompasses ""securities"" are detailed in the Securities Act of 1933, which was enacted by the United States federal government. One main exception, which I would still consider securities for your purposes, would be ""commercial paper"". These are exempt from the securities act because they mature in 270 days of less, but they function much like bonds or promissory notes Therefore though, it would not encompass currencies and commodities. It really comes down to the structure of the agreement for transferring or holding the particular kind of underlying asset."
A security is a class of financial instrument you can trade on the market.  A share of stock is a kind of security, for example, as is a bond. In the case of your mortgage, what happens: You take out a loan for $180k.  The loan has two components. a.  The payment stream (meaning the principal and the interest) from the loan b.  The servicing of the loan, meaning the company who is responsible for accepting payments, giving the resulting income to whomever owns it. Many originating banks, such as my initial lender, do neither of these things - they sell the payment stream to a large bank or consortium (often Fannie Mae) and they also sell the servicing of the loan to another company. The payment stream is the primary value here (the servicing is worth essentially a tip off the top).  The originating bank lends $180k of their own money.  Then they have something that is worth some amount - say $450k total value, $15k per year for 30 years - and they sell it for however much they can get for it.  The actual value of $15k/year for 30 years is somewhere in between - less than $450k more than $180k - since there is risk involved, and the present value is far less.  The originating bank has the benefit of selling that they can then originate more mortgages (and make money off the fees) plus they can reduce their risk exposure. Then a security is created by the bigger bank, where they take a bunch of mortgages of different risk levels and group them together to make something with a very predictable risk quotient.  Very similar to insurance, really, except the other way around.  One mortage will either default or not at some % chance, but it's a one off thing - any good statistician will tell you that you don't do statistics on n=1.  One hundred mortgages, each with some risk level, will very consistently return a particular amount, within a certain error, and thus you have something that people are willing to pay money on the market for. "Securities clearing and settlement is a complex topic - you can start by browsing relevant Wikipedia articles, and (given sufficient quantities of masochism and strong coffee) progress to entire technical books. You're correct - modern trade settlement systems are electronic and heavily streamlined.  However, you're never going to see people hand over assets until they're sure that payment has cleared - given current payment systems, that means the fastest settlement time is going to be the next business day (so-called T+1 settlement), which is what's seen for heavily standardized instruments like standard options and government debt securities. Stocks present bigger obstacles.  First, the seller has to locate the asset being sold & make sure they have clear title to it... which is tougher than it might seem, given the layers of abstraction/virtualization involved in the chain of ownership & custody, complicated in particular by ""rehypothecation"" involved in stock borrowing/lending for short sales... especially since stock borrow/lending record-keeping tends to be somewhat slipshod (cf. periodic uproar about ""naked shorting"" and ""failure to deliver""). Second, the seller has to determine what exactly it is that they have sold... which, again, can be tougher than it might seem.  You see, stocks are subject to all kinds of corporate actions (e.g. cash distributions, spin-offs, splits, liquidations, delistings...)  A particular topic of keen interest is who exactly is entitled to large cash distributions - the buyer or the seller?  Depending on the cutoff date (the ""ex-dividend date""), the seller may need to deliver to the buyer just the shares of stock, or the shares plus a big chunk of cash - a significant difference in settlement.  Determining the precise ex-dividend date (and so what exactly are the assets to be settled) can sometimes be very difficult... it's usually T-2, except in the case of large distributions, which are usually T+1, unless the regulatory authority has neglected to declare an ex-dividend date, in which case it defaults to standard DTC payment policy (i.e. T-2)... I've been involved in a few situations where the brokers involved were clueless, and full settlement of ""due bills"" for cash distributions to the buyer took several months of hard arguing. So yeah, the brokers want a little time to get their records in order and settle the trade correctly." I think that some asset classes should be better protected from arbitrage.  Its not possible to prevent either greed or information asymmetry so high market volatility will continue to get worse.  However, secondary transactions directly or indirectly involving assets of a protected class:  * Food - agriculture futures, farm land mortgages, seed licenses, etc...  * Housing - Resales, mortgages, any mortgage derivatives  * Medicine - Insurance policies, drug licenses, medical debt  * Education - Debt and derivatives  Should be heavily taxes to discourage destructive arbitrage.  This will not hurt investment (in the capitalist sense) because such transactions are purely speculative. "Institutional ownership has nearly lost all meaning. It used to mean mutual funds, investment banks, etc. Now, it means pension funds, who hold the rest of the equity assets directly, and insiders. Since the vast majority of investors in equity do not hold it directly, ""institutions"" are approaching 100% ownership on all major equities. Other sites still segment the data." First, realize that Wikipedia is written by individuals, just like this board has thousands of members. The two definition were written and edited by different people, most likely.  Think Venn diagram.  The definition for financial instruments claims that it's the larger set, and securities is contained in a subset.  Comparing the two, it seems pretty consistent.  Yes, Securities include derivatives.  Transferable is close to tradable, although to me tradable implies a market as compared to private transfers.  I don't believe there's an opposite, per se, but there's 'other stuff.' My house has value, but is not a security. My coffee cup has no value. Back to the concept of Venn. There aren't really opposites, just items falling outside the set we're discussing.  I'd caution, this is a semantic exercise. If you know what you're buying, a stock, a bond, a gold bar, etc, whether it's a financial instrument or security doesn't matter to you. "You might find some of the answers here helpful; the question is different, but has some similar concerns, such as a changing economic environment. What approach should I take to best protect my wealth against currency   devaluation & poor growth prospects. I want to avoid selling off any   more of my local index funds in a panic as I want to hold long term.   Does my portfolio balance make sense? Good question; I can't even get US banks to answer questions like this, such as ""What happens if they try to nationalize all bank accounts like in the Soviet Union?""  Response: it'll never happen. The question was what if! I think that your portfolio carries a lot of risk, but also offsets what you're worried about.  Outside of government confiscation of foreign accounts (if your foreign investments are held through a local brokerage), you should be good.  What to do about government confiscation?  Even the US government (in 1933) confiscated physical gold (and they made it illegal to own) - so even physical resources can be confiscated during hard times. Quite a large portion of my foreign investments have been bought at an   expensive time when our currency is already around historic lows,   which does concern me in the event that it strengthens in future. What   strategy should I take in the future if/when my local currency starts   the strengthen...do I hold my foreign investments through it and just   trust in cost averaging long term, or try sell them off to avoid the   devaluation? Are these foreign investments a hedge?  If so, then you shouldn't worry if your currency does strengthen; they serve the purpose of hedging the local environment.  If these investments are not a hedge, then timing will matter and you'll want to sell and buy your currency before it does strengthen.  The risk on this latter point is that your timing will be wrong." There is a third type of asset that a GIC falls into: Cash. So while it does share some characteristics of a bond, such as (often) having a fixed interest rate, and having the ability to ladder their maturities, they would generally be considered part of your Cash component of your portfolio. Mining is income at the value at time of earning, I would use an index like XBX to determine price. Asset appreciation is capital gains. These aspects of crypto-assets are not a gray area in the US financial sector, and have been addressed for almost half a decade now. I thought the same. Money as a transferable item is against future items, and debt is a transferable item against future money, which is also seen as a much farther into the future item.  Money = tomorrows item. Debt = tomorrows money = (tomorrows item)(time +1); or longer if we agree to pay it off over 20 years  Interestingly I have seen a writeup on why gold is the material of choice.   If someone can find this it would be great but I will try write from memory, Google is not helping. The story is something like this:  Essentially when trading a material for jewellery we had difficulty finding what material to use. Obviously it must be something hardy and tough, but not common. Metals are the obvious choice, although crystalline structures like gems and opals are useful. The reason for metals are that they can easily and repeatably be shaped into a form that will be aesthetically pleasing and hold its shape.   But which specific metal is to be chosen; obviously it must be chemically stable, so potassium magnesium and those metal like elements are removed from contention. It must be rare so items like lead, iron and copper are too common, although not worthless.  The most stable, malleable and rare materials are Platinum, Silver and Gold.   Platinum requires too high a melting point to be suitable; the requirements to smelt and handle it as a material are too high. Not to deny the value but the common use it prohibitive.   Silver is easier to handle, but tends to tarnish. Continuous upkeep is required and this becomes a detraction of its full value.  Finally Gold, rare, low melting point, resistant to tarnishing and oxidation, rare, malleable and pretty. A sweet spot of all materials. "Ditto to MD-Tech, but from a more ""philosophical"" point of view: When you buy stock, you own it, just like you own a cell phone or a toaster or a pair of socks that you bought. The difference is that a share of stock means that you own a piece of a corporation. You can't physically take possession of it and put it in your garage, because if all the stock-holders did that, then all the company's assets would be scattered around all the stock-holder's garages and the company couldn't function. Like if you bought a 1/11 share in a football team, you couldn't take one of the football players home and keep him in your closet, because then the team wouldn't be able to function. (I might want to take one of the cheerleaders home, but that's another subject ...) In pre-electronic times, you could get a piece of paper that said, ""XYZ Corporation - 1 share"". You could take physical possession of this piece of paper and put it in your filing cabinet. I'm not sure if you can even get such certificates any more; I haven't seen one in decades. These days it's just recorded electronically. That doesn't mean that you don't own it. It just means that someone else is keeping the records for you. It's like leaving your car in a parking lot. It's still your car. The people who run the parking lot doesn't own it. They are keeping it for you, but just because they have physical possession doesn't make it theirs." I commented about oil in response to u/timothyblomfield. I know way more about oil than any other commodities.   But steel is another heavily scrutinized commodity. All the talk of China importing illegal steel, people losing steel jobs, etc. Commodities become important like this when international politics become involved. "Sure, it doesn't, but realistically they can't/shouldn't do anything about it in their index funds, because then they're just another stock picker, trying to gauge which companies are going to do best.  Their funds not all being indexes is what I was getting at with my original question. How much leeway do they have in their definitions of other funds? IE, if they had a dividend fund that included all large cap dividend paying stocks above 3% yield, they couldn't take out Shell just because of climate risk without fundamentally changing what the fund is. But if it's just ""income fund"" then they can do whatever in that space." From Wikipedia: Investment has different meanings in finance and economics. In Finance   investment is putting money into something with the expectation of   gain, that upon thorough analysis, has a high degree of security for   the principal amount, as well as security of return, within an   expected period of time. In contrast putting money into something with   an expectation of gain without thorough analysis, without security of   principal, and without security of return is speculation or gambling. The second part of the question can be addressed by analyzing the change in gold price vs inflation year by year over the long term. As Chuck mentioned, there are periods in which it didn't exceed inflation. More important, over any sufficiently long length of time the US stock market will outperform. Those who bought at the '87 peak aren't doing too bad, yet those who bought in the last gold bubble haven't kept up with inflation. $850 put into gold at the '80 top would inflate today to $2220 per the inflation calculator. You can find with a bit of charting some periods where gold outpaced inflation, and some where it missed. Back to the definition of investment. I think gold fits speculation far better than it does investment. I've heard the word used in ways I'd disagree with, spend what you will on the shoes, but no, they aren't an investment, I tell my wife. The treadmill purchase may improve my health, and people may use the word colloquially, but it's not an investment. Stockpiled as treasuries, which are a debt security, they are liabilities.  You're making the case that as the gov't spends it's ability to spend increases as the economy grows? It's not like we're flipping a switch and turning on a light bulb  Edit: it's more like walking out on a tight-rope while people are yelling at you haha It's rather evident that, despite the nay-sayers, food prices will go down due to this deal. Amazon is laser-focused on two things: making things cheaper and getting things to you faster. They've developed/ are developing a strong base of knowledge and development in machine learning, robotics, and blockchain, which would greatly facilitate these two tasks. However, as stated in the article, this will not have a significant effect on inflation due to the fact that the economy makes up for it in other respects (*cough* rising tuition and oil prices *cough*). It's interesting to note that food inflation was warned against by several experts within the past two years but this deal might change that (see: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-price-outlook/summary-findings.aspx ).