Hi there, Boaz is away and so I’m filling in for the next few days. I want to tell you about something that has been making me incredibly nervous since I found out about it over a month ago. Aside…

BALTIMORE – The stock market got a healthy bounce on Monday. Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess. But you don’t have to guess. Because you don’t make money in the stock market from short-term moves. You’ll guess wrong…

HAMILTON, BERMUDA – Stocks rattled around on Monday; investors didn’t know where they wanted to go… so they went mostly nowhere. We turn to the newspapers… Invitation to Claptrap Opening a newspaper is always an invitation to claptrap. The New…

What are Treasuries? Treasuries are the common name for the United States Treasury securities. These are government debt instruments issued to finance the national debt of the US, the equivalent of British gilts or German bunds. US Treasuries are considered…

What is fiscal policy? Fiscal policy refers to ways of using government revenue collection, namely taxes, and spending it with the aim of influencing the economy. By altering the levels of taxation and public expenditure, a government’s goal is to…

What is a swap? A swap is a derivative in which two parties exchange financial instruments, in most cases involving cash flows between them. These cash flows are calculated over a notional principal amount. Each cash flow is commonly referred…

What is a defensive stock? A defensive stock is a type of stock that generates a constant dividend and stable earnings independently of the state of the stockmarket performance. Defensive stocks are typical of firms that produce or distribute consumer…

What is correlation? In the finance and investment industries, correlation is a statistic that measures the degree to which two securities move in relation to each other. Correlation is computed into what is known as the correlation coefficient, which has…

What is deleveraging? Deleveraging is when a firm or individual aims to decrease its total financial leverage. The simplest way for achieving deleverage is to pay off any existing debt on its balance sheet. When this is not possible, the…

What is private equity and how does it work? In finance, a private equity is a way of raising investment capital from high net worth individuals and institutions for the purpose of investing and acquiring equity ownership in companies. A…

What is a credit rating? A credit rating is a way of measuring the likelihood of a prospective debtor paying back a debt.  In practice, it represents an evaluation of the creditworthiness of the debtor and the risk of defaulting….

What is a CFD trade? In finance, a contract for difference, or CFD, is a type of financial derivative that allows traders to profit from movements in asset prices. Speculations on prices moving up are known as long positions, and…

What is a ‘handle’ in trading? In trading, a handle is the whole number part of a price quote, disregarding the decimal. For example, if a quote for a stock is £78.42, the handle will be £78. Traders often refer…

What is the DAX? The Deutscher Aktienindex, commonly referred to as the DAX index, or simply DAX, is a blue-chip stockmarket index consisting of the 30 largest German companies trading on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Big names like Adidas, BMW,…

What is Deflation? In economics, deflation is a sustained decrease in the prices of goods and services and a contraction in the supply of circulated money within an economy. It is the opposite of inflation – in fact, deflation only…

What is Money Supply? The ‘money supply’ is the total amount of monetary assets available, like currency in circulation and demand deposits convertible into cash, in an economy at a specific time. This definition may vary, as sometimes it is…

What is liquidity? In economics, liquidity refers to the amount of cash, cash equivalents or other assets that can be converted into cash without difficulty. Money, or cash, is the most liquid asset out there. It can be easily exchanged…

What is a dividend? In finance, dividends are company profits that are paid to its shareholders. Usually, they can be distributed as cash deposited into a bank account (cash dividend) or in the form of further shares (stock dividend), if…