Tag: investing
Mutual Funds
Mutual Funds are one of the most popular investment vehicles available to large and small investors today. Mutual funds provide an appealing combination of specific market focus, skilled active management and reduced risk compared to individual stock investing. It’s no wonder many small individual investors, often with the advice of their financial advisor, choose a varied portfolio of ...
Index Funds
Index funds are a type of Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) that focuses on the performance of specific stock indices, as opposed to other types of ETFs that are based on oil or other commodities. Index funds are appealing to certain kinds of investors because they are inherently more stable than investing in specific stocks. Index funds spread the risk factor over the entire index, which in the ...
Bonds
Bonds are one of the most popular types of debt securities. Bonds are issued by companies and governments, the most notable example of which is Treasury Bonds issued by the US government. In fact, the very first securities traded in the United States were bonds issued in 1790 to raise funds to pay down debts incurred by the newly formed government during the Revolutionary War.
Stocks
Stocks are, in their prime definition, shares in the ownership and assets of a company. Although there are many types of stock, such as Preferred Stock, most often the term refers to so-called Common Stock or Common Shares that can be freely traded, usually at a Stock Exchange. Owners of common stock are shareholders in the issuing company, and therefore have voting rights.
Currencies
Foreign Currencies are traded regularly, usually by large investment banks or institutional investors on the Foreign Exchange Market. This foreign exchange trading is commonly known as Forex or “FX Trading”. In most cases, the values of the world’s currencies are not locked against one another. In fact, their relative values change by the second, and this provides opportunities for long or ...
Commodities
Commodities and Futures trading is a crucially important part of our modern economic system, on a par with the trading of stocks and bonds. Let’s look at Commodities first. Commodities are products that are produced in a standardized format, like bushels of wheat or barrels of oil, and are traded on the basis of their price. The fact that the market price for commodities varies due to a host ...
Etfs
Exchange traded funds, or ETFs for short, are investment funds that trade as shares on major stock exchanges. There are many different kinds of ETFs; some specializing in commodity sectors like oil or gold and others acting as tradable replicas of stock market indices like the NASDAQ or S&P 500. For many investors, large and small, it’s much easier to buy shares in an ETF modeled after the ...