A contract, not a thing — one side’s claim on future value is the other side’s obligation to deliver it.
“Financial instruments” gets used loosely in market commentary to mean roughly “the tradeable stuff institutions move around” — stocks, bonds, options, swaps, structured products. The formal definition is narrower and more useful: a financial instrument is any contract that gives rise to a financial asset for one entity and a financial liability or equity instrument for another.
That definition — codified internationally in IAS 32 and IFRS 9 — is what lets wildly different products (a share of stock, a currency swap, a corporate bond) be classified and regulated under one coherent framework, because what they share isn’t their form but their contractual structure: a claim on one side, an obligation on the other.
A bubble “driven by institutional players and financial instruments” is pointing at this same mechanism the Institutional Flows entry covers from the capital-movement side: large pools of capital using these contractual structures to take, hedge, or amplify a position — sometimes faster than the underlying asset’s real value could justify.
Source: International Accounting Standards Board, IAS 32 “Financial Instruments: Presentation” and IFRS 9 “Financial Instruments.” A regulatory/accounting standard, not peer-reviewed academic literature — the authoritative definitional source for this term, distinct in tier from the research citations elsewhere in this Lexicon.