A mortgage-backed security is an investment in which the purchaser buys a slice of a pool of mortgage loans. As explained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), “mortgage-backed securities, called MBS, are bonds secured by home and other real estate loans. They are created when a number of these loans, usually with similar characteristics, are pooled together. For instance, a bank offering home mortgages might round up $10 million worth of such mortgages. That pool is then sold to a federal government agency like Ginnie Mae or a government sponsored-enterprise (GSE) such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or to a securities firm to be used as the collateral for the new MBS.”
For a deeper understanding of mortgage-backed securities, see FINRA’s article on mortgage-backed securities here.
[Last updated in April of 2022 by the Wex Definitions Team]