Bootstrapping

(1) Means of financing a small company by employing highly creative ways of using and acquiring resources without raising equity from traditional sources or borrowing money from the bank.
(2) Techniques used to decompose the prices of an instrument in the market to the prices of instruments that are analytically more tractable. It is most commonly used to describe the process of mapping a yield curve defined through a series of market instruments into a series of zero-coupon bonds. It also applies, for example, to the mapping of a term volatility surface indexed by strike and time to maturity to a local volatility surface indexed by spot and elapsed time.