1. Neither a bull or bear market, a .......... market is characterized by low activity, with timid investors waiting for a sign of which way the market is going to end up moving.

2. Aggressive price cutting by Wal-Mart Stores, the world's biggest retailer, is likely to put .......... pressure on food manufacturers this year: with commodity prices rising, one would expect that manufacturers would pass their cost increases along — but not if Wal-Mart won't allow it.

3. The NHS in England will be 750m in the .......... by the end of the financial year on 31 March, a BBC survey suggests: twenty predicted deficits total 799m, while a handful of surpluses brought the net deficit to 750m.

4. In May 2000, Luminous had raised a $60-million round of private financing that it expected to be its last, but market conditions forced the company to put off IPO plans indefinitely; should the company go public, they hoped .......... investors would buy the offering and continue to buy the company's shares.

5. Request a copy of the decedent's credit report and request that the report be flagged with a deceased .......... : this should ensure that no fraudulent accounts are opened.

6. 'Derivatives' is rich in details about factual trading matters, something rarely found in textbooks; it includes a list of the major old tricks, such as cherry picking, chumming, and .......... (in which market makers collude to push a price in a given direction), something I have not seen in options books before.

7. SupplierMarket.com was poised to go public, but in the meantime, it received a .......... offer it couldn't refuse from Ariba, a software maker; the all stock deal was worth $581 million — not bad for a company that was around for 17 months.

8. A .......... trap is a defense mechanism used by a company that has convertible securities outstanding to prevent an unfriendly takeover; it prohibits conversion into common stock of any convertible preferred stock or bonds if the owner of those securities would control 10% or more of the firm's common stock following conversion.

9. George Akerlof, Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, who received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, 2001, extended economic theory when they augmented it with the realistic assumption of .......... information: agents on one side of the market have much better information than those on the other side.

10. Jeffrey Saut, chief market strategist with Raymond James, described the current environment as a ' .......... ' economy, meaning he expects several periods of strong economic and earnings growth to be followed by times where profits and the economy slow down a bit.