The terms overweight and underweight are used by brokers and fund managers to indicate their preference for stocks or markets relative to particular indices or benchmarks.
If, for example, a fund manage who uses the FTSE 100 as a benchmark says he is overweight BT, he means that he holds a greater percentage of BT shares in his portfolio than BT's weighting in the FTSE 100. If he is underweight he means the opposite.
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