<Definition> A prime broker (PB) is a financial institution that bundles together the multiple services professional investors, chiefly hedge funds, need to trade continuously in financial markets. Hedge funds and similar investors buy and sell numerous financial instruments, must fund those trades, and must manage the resulting securities and cash after each trade. A prime broker consolidates these market-participation functions within a single institution. Its representative functions include clearing and settlement (handling post-trade delivery and paperwork), financing (supplying the funds needed to trade), margin management (managing the collateral needed to maintain positions), and custody (safekeeping the customer's securities and assets). In short, unlike a hedge fund, which makes its own investment decisions, a prime broker is positioned as the institution that supports a customer's continuous market participation through funding, post-trade processing, and asset management.[1]