Investing for Beginners

Investments can be baffling, and annuities are no exception. Annuities are a life insurance product, but rather than paying out upon your death, an annuity begins to pay out when the owner of the...

Online financial trading is the process of buying or selling currencies or financial securities--such as stocks, bonds, futures and options--through an Internet-based trading platform. You can...

Selecting the best discount broker for your investment needs goes beyond looking for the lowest trading fees. Trading speed, server uptime, user interface, customer service and security are all...

Buying and selling foreign currencies, also known as FOREX trading, is a risky and potentially lucrative investment practice; similar to stock investments FOREX trading can produce large gains but...

Preferred stock and common stock both represent shares of ownership in a company, but the rights granted to a preferred shareholder differ from a common shareholder's rights.

Capital gains taxes are taxes imposed on profit earned from selling an asset that has appreciated over time, such as real estate and stock investments. The tax rate varies based on income and...

Savings accounts are a popular way to save money and are often the first step a person takes in that direction. As a general rule, savings accounts have low yields compared to other investment...

Vanguard offers nine money market funds. Five of them invest in the short-term obligations of the state governments of California, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The other four...

Sometimes, you may wish you'd invested in the stock market earlier in life. You probably wonder how much you could've made if you invested when you were much younger, but now it is the time to do...

Stock index funds are a conservative approach to investing in the stock market and can produce attractive profits. High quality bonds are also a conservative investment that in some situations...

For the novice investor, buying cheap shares may be as simple as investing in penny stocks or stock valued under $5, but this isn't really the best way to go about finding cheap investments. While...

The World Federation of Exchanges includes 53 regulated stock exchanges throughout the world, in every continent and in most developed countries; an indication of the value they bring to the...

Buying and selling activity in the financial markets causes stocks to rise and fall. That trading is based on investor demand for stocks. Demand is influenced in part by corporate profits,...

Whether you're a novice or experienced investor, investing can be a difficult endeavor. However, there are ways to make the experience easier. One issue is trying to make sense of, and organize...

The stock market can be a risky endeavor as no investment is completely risk free. This is especially the case for those who are just beginning to invest in the market. In this case, setting up a...

In the world of investments and finance, the settlement date can be either a day of great relief or one of great regret. It is essentially the date when the cash is paid.

If you are in high school and want to learn how to invest in stocks there are a lot of educational tools available today that weren't around even just a few years ago. There are simulators to...

A Series I Savings Bond (or I bond for short) is an inflation-linked bond sold by the U.S. Treasury. Anyone with a Social Security number can invest in I bonds. I bonds come in paper form...

Value and growth index funds are two types of mutual funds that take a different approach to investment strategy. The goal for both strategies, however, is to take advantage of movements in the...

Interest rates are the costs associated with borrowing money; the higher the interest rate, the higher the cost of borrowing money. The level of the interest rate has many impacts on the economy.

Ever wondered how to become an investor in the next great movie franchise? A movie franchise is typically based on the intellectual property of an original work of media or commercial product...

Let's start with the basic definitions: Stocks are part-ownership in a business and a cut of the profits. Bonds are money lent to businesses, governments or other organizations. Risk generally...

Inflation is the rise in the prices of goods and services over a period of time. This means that with inflation, the purchasing power of a dollar a year ago is less than it is today. As a result,...

The term forex trading refers to exchanging currencies on the foreign exchange market. Trading is almost entirely carried out online, rather than in a centralized location like stocks traded on an...

A public stock is a share in a corporation offered with the purpose of raising money for the corporation. The shares are available to anyone willing to pay the offered value at first issuance or...

The basic issues in finance concern the source and value of money, levels of analysis, fixed and variable costs, and inflation. These are just a few, but are essential for a beginning...

In the financial world, a certificate of deposit (CD) is a certificate from a bank stating that the person named on it has a specified sum of money on deposit for a given period of time at a fixed...

When you think about investments, stocks and bonds are most likely what first pop into your mind. However, there are dozens of different ways you can invest your money, with gold being one of the...

The breakout strategy is a popular method used amongst beginners and professionals to identify major market moves in their earliest moments. This method bases trading on simple chart observations...

There are numerous techniques to trade commodity options, and there are a few different markets that allow investors and hedgers access to commodity products. Commodities are usually defined as...

Stock and bond returns are based on different risk/return dynamics. Generally speaking, stocks are more volatile than bond portfolios, providing higher capital gains on invested capital at higher...

A prospectus is a legal document required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for companies that are registering securities for sale to the public. The document is required under...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defines earnings per share (EPS) as how much money shareholders would receive for each share of stock they own if the company distributed all of...

Choosing a stock can be very difficult, especially if you're not familiar with the terminology or the criteria professional investment and fund managers use to purchase stock. The Internet is a...

Calculating your profit or loss in the Forex is not difficult. For instance, let's say that you opened a Forex account by depositing $10,000 with your Forex service provider. At the time of your...

Investors buy shares issued on the stock market and obtain equity stakes in companies. There are two types of investors: retail and institutional. Together, trillions of dollars are traded on the...

Conservative investing aims to grow money at a slow but steady pace. When markets fluctuate wildly and economies around the world go on a roller-coaster ride, conservative investing looks...

There are dozens of different acronyms and terms used in financial indexes. One of the most critical and commonly seen of these is the LIBOR rate. Most people have some interaction with the LIBOR...

The present value of an annuity is the value of all future payments after backing out, or removing, the interest each earns between the present time and the time of payment. The present-value...

The Standard and Poor's 500 and Fortune 500 are both stock indexes, used as benchmarks for our overall economic health. Both consist of the world's largest corporations, but the two vary in their...

A certificate of deposit is a way to take your hard-earned money and earn more money on it through interest. CD's don't mature over night, but in a few years you can make some extra cash to help...

Forex is one of the largest trading markets in the world. If a nation has a currency, it can be traded in the forex market. However, the bulk of forex trading is done on the following currency...

Options are securities or contracts based an underlying asset, such as shares of stock. They give the investor the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an asset within a specified time at...

One of an investor's greatest nightmares is buying a stock position and then watching the market decline, day after day, leaving him with a position bought at the market's high price for that...

With the abundance of financial news available in the media, many individuals are interested in investing in the stock market, but don't know how to begin. For some, even the initial task of...

Life insurance is the gift you give your family in the event of your death. It will at least cover the cost of a funeral and at best secure survivors' economic stability for the duration of their...

FOREX, or FX, translate simply to foreign exchange. They are used to identify the system that allows the currencies of various countries to be traded. It is estimated that the foreign-exchange...

Investing is the act of putting money into stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, or some other financial vehicle, with the hopes that it will grow. Two personal styles of investing are day...

A fundamental lesson for any first-year business student is how to calculate the cost of debt. Specifically, how to calculate the weighted average (debt and equity) cost of capital in order to...

An index is a good way to gauge the direction of the stock market, especially within a particular exchange. Three popular indexes are the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the S&P 500 and...