leverage

1. (by extension) Any influence which is compounded or used to gain an advantage.Examples: "Try using competitors’ prices for leverage in the negotiation."; "The former Forest man, who passed a late fitness test, appeared to use Guy Moussi for leverage before nodding in David Fox's free-kick at the far post - his 22nd goal of the season."broadlyuncountableusually

2. (finance) The use of borrowed funds with a contractually determined return to increase the ability to invest and earn an expected higher return, but usually at high risk.Examples: "Leverage is great until something goes wrong with your investments and you still have to pay your debts."; "Online margin trading is usually based on leverage, where the brokerage effectively lets you borrow more money than you have deposited as collateral."; "Both exchanges offer crypto derivatives, which are bets on future fluctuations in cryptocurrency prices. They also offer extreme leverage — up to 125 times on Binance. That means a $1,000 down payment can be turned into a $125,000 gamble."uncountableusually

3. (finance) The debt-to-equity ratio.Examples: "In such cases where there is a multiple capital structure the factor known as leverage comes into play."Synonyms: gearinguncountableusually

4. (business) The ability to earn very high returns when operating at high-capacity utilization of a facility.Examples: "Their variable-cost-reducing investments have dramatically increased their leverage."Synonyms: operating leverageuncountableusually

5. (statistics, regression analytics) The distance of between an independent observation and other observations.uncountableusually