In finance, leverage (sometimes referred to as gearing in the United Kingdom and Australia) is any technique to multiply gains and losses.

Most often it involves buying more of an asset by using borrowed funds, with the belief that the income from the asset or asset price appreciation will be more than the cost of borrowing.

Almost always this involves the risk that borrowing costs will be larger than the income from the asset or the value of the asset will fall, leading to incurred losses.