a line marking the highest level reached

The highest peak in value that an investment fund/account has reached. This term is often used in the context of fund manager compensation, which is partly performance based. The high watermark ensures that the manager does not charge a performance fee after a losing period and before having recovered the losses. So if the fund performs negatively over a period, it will have to return above the high watermark before charging a performance fee. For example, if after reaching its peak in year one a fund loses $100,000 in year two, and then makes $250,000 in year three. The performance fee will only be charged on $150,000 ($250,000 - $100,000).

The highest price or net asset value ( NAV) reached by a fund. A performance fee is not paid until the NAV reaches a new high-water mark, surpassing all previous ones.

(Spatial User's Guide and Reference; search in this book)

Expressed in number of records and associated with the deprecated Spatial partitioned table structure, it defines the maximum number of records to store in a table before decomposing another level. The high-water mark determines the maximum size of a partition within the Spatial table. Partitioned tables were an alternative to spatial indexing.