alpha
n.— «What, exactly, do investors think they are buying when they hire investment managers such as hedge fund general partners? They would probably say something like “the ability to outperform the market”. In professional investor parlance, that is called “alpha”, or the excess returns that the general partner’s skill at active management provides. He knows from number crunching that Ford bonds would come back from the dead, or that nickel inventories were too high.» —“Sometimes monkeys rolling dice won’t do” by John Dizard Financial Times (U.K.) May 17, 2004. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...