In the trading/sale of securities, in retail markets, and in pretty much all the realms of things you can buy, somebody bought it before you did and paid...$X. Then they stuck a price tag on it that said something like $2X or $5X or $10,001X, and sold it to you at a profit. They "marked up" the price they originally paid.
A markdown is the opposite...where a retailer says "no one's buying this stinky fish at this price, and I've got to get rid of it now or never, so I'll mark the price down until someone bites."
It also refers to the amount taken away from the final price of a security when it's sold to a dealer on the over-the-counter market. It's most often seen in the municipal bonds market, when no one wants to buy the stinky-fish debt of a random small town.
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Finance: What is mark to market?2 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is mark-to-market?
alright well Google was private for a long time before it went public public [Google timeline appears]
mutual funds bought the shares of the company when it was private, the company
did a few later stage B C and D rounds before going public in 2004 and each
iteration those subsequent rounds valued the company more highly so a mutual fund
invested say 20 million dollars in the B round they would have seen the C round
done at maybe double the valuation and while that mutual fund would then
mark to market or mark up their twenty million dollar investment to now be
worth forty million dollars even though the stock of goog was not yet publicly
traded and then it came along the D round which was done at triple the [D round investment appears]
valuation of the C round so then those shares of goog would have to be again
marked up or marked to the new current market valuation which was three times
the previous rounds valuation of 40 million aka a hundred twenty million
bucks today eventually the company did go public and there was no longer need [Google stock price rises on graph]
to mark its value to the market because well the market valued it basically
every second of the trading day if you want to learn more about all this stuff
well then you can just you know google it