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What is After Hours Trading/Extended Trading? After hours trading describes any trades made after the market closes or before the market opens. Bec...

What is a thin market, and has it been on Jenny Craig recently?

What are moving averages? Moving averages are calculated using past stock prices in an attempt to determine future trends. It’s calculated by ave...

What is Above Full Employment Equilibrium? Above Full Employment Equilibrium happens when an economy is basically doing more than it realistically...

What are Bond Anticipation Notes (BANS), Revenue Anticipation Notes (RANS), and Tax Anticipation Notes (TANS)? BANS, RANS and TANS are all short-te...

What are T-Notes, T-Bonds, and TIPS? T-Notes are debt securities (like bonds) that are issued by the government and mature within one to 10 years....

What is After Tax Yield? After tax yield is simply how much an investment makes (or yields) after taxes have been paid. This term refers to bond yi...

Investment objectives and styles vary from investor to investor. Some are in it for the long haul. Others, um... don't look at "Ponzi" as a dirty w...

What is the S&P 500? It's Standard & Poor's 500 generally largest companies, with a U.S. domestic bias. The S&P 500 is usually what investors think...

How do you get a startup funded? Depends if we're talking about a tech startup, or a non-tech startup. If you've got a promising, budding tech comp...

Are monopolies evil? Should they be regulated? Should they be illegal? Monopolies in and of themselves, are neither good nor evil. How they conduct...

What is liquidity? Think: water. It's liquid. It can be squeezed into little, tiny spaces and infused into large spaces. A defining trait of liquid...

A liquid market is a market featuring high trading volumes, i.e. investors actually want to put their cash to work.

What's a yankee bond, and does it stick a feather in its cap and call it macaroni?

What are credit ratings and how are they interpreted? Credit ratings describe a borrower’s likelihood to pay back their debts; it’s a look at h...

Who is Warren Buffett, and how do we get him to give us a loan...?

What are CEOs, CFOs, and COOs? The “C” level executives in a corporation are the corporate officers responsible for the management decisions an...

"Golden handcuffs" refers to someone vesting into their stock options by sticking it out at their company. It won't go on their permanent record.

What is an Affiliated Person or Affiliated Investor? An affiliated person is known as an insider in the financial world. These are the people who h...

What is ROE? ROE is an acronym for Return on Equity. For shareholders, it is a metric equivalent for return on assets. The formula for ROE is Net I...

What does it mean to "go public?" An IPO raises cash in the form of equity, usually, for investors. When public, a company exists under SEC dominion, and must follow and file a forest-worth of paperwork: 10Qs, 10Ks, Annual reports, 8Ks, and myriad other really boring documents.

What is Payment in Kind/PIK? PIK is the technical term for barter payment. If you give your plumber a pair of tickets for an NFL game that are worth the same as the fee he would have charged for a toilet repair, that would be an example of PIK. Another example is when Disney used PIK for its acquisition of Marvel Entertainment by paying in Disney stock rather than in cash. Mutual Funds that make distributions in additional shares would also be categorized as PIK instead of cash.

What does “Called Away” mean? Calling away means that an option has been called and exercised and the writer is now responsible for giving the person who bought the option the underlying asset (or responsible for buying the asset as would be the case with a put). This term is also used with the trading of other securities like bonds.

What is real return? Real return is the actual return made from an investment after inflation is factored in. Return is expressed as a percentage called a nominal rate of return before inflation; real return shows how much was actually made given inflation.

When you realize a gain or loss, it means that you turn an investment into cash. Thrilling, we know.

If you go to an arcade and want to play coin-operated games, you will often exchange $1 bills for (4) quarters at a time. This is the equivalent of a 1 for 4 stock split. The net value is the same, but you have more small units instead of a single larger one. The advantage for a stock is that its lower price represents an easier entry level for new investors to get involved, since buying shares of a stock at 25 is easier for an initial portfolio allocation than at 100. A forward split is usually an indication that a company is growing and attracting more investors. Conversely, a reverse split would be like getting a dollar for your 4 quarters. Reasons for a reverse split could be too much stock outstanding to move the stock price, flushing out naked short sellers, or a post reverse merger stock overhang cleanup.

NAV isn't a cool new navigation app...it's how mutual fund shares are valued or priced at the end of each trading day.

What is amortization? Amortization tracks the decline in value of a contract or service, usually paid for in advance. You received $10,000 in advance to water Ms. Maple's lawn for 10 months. She amortizes your watering to the tune of a decline in value of that contract of $1,000 as each month goes by.

What are Weighted Averages and Expected Values? Weighted averages are averages calculated to account for the number of changes that a variable, such as price, may have, especially when the same asset may have been added to the portfolio in varying quantities and price costs over time for a cumulative total. Expected Values is an anticipated prediction of an asset’s value over a specified time that is calculated as the total of possible results times their statistical probability.

What are the types of income tax? Federal income tax. State income tax. Real estate tax. Value Added Tax (VAT). Some tax is progressive, some tax is regressive. The commonality: they're all bad.

What is Consent To Service Of Process? A Consent to Service of Process is basically a Power of Attorney type of relationship established between an individual and a company so that the company has the authority to accept legal documents on behalf of the individual.

What is a Deep Discount Bond? Bonds are priced in accordance to maturity, coupon, and rating, which all affect the yield. If any of these factors results in a yield less than bonds that are otherwise similarly categorized, it will be discounted in the market compared to its peers. A deep discount bond will be the result of one of the variables having a larger variance than normal, such as the bond’s rating getting lowered or the coupon getting stripped. As a result, the price will be substantially less than its peers’ due to the calculated increase in risk or decrease in return.

What is Capital Gains Tax? Capital gain taxes are taxes collected by the IRS on trading profits from investments in equities, real estate, or any other type of transaction in which something defined as an asset is bought and then resold at a profit. The amount of assessed capital gains taxes is contingent upon the length of time the asset was held.

What are position trading and swing trading? Get your mind out of the gutter. They're way more boring than they sound.

Work-in-process inventory is just inventory... that is in the process of being built. In other words, it accounts for the inventory's asset value.

What is tax loss carry-forward? We promise it's a real thing, not just a bunch of words strung together.

What is a Future Value calculation? Future Value is used to find the value of an investment at some point in the future based on expected growth or interest rate. The calculation requires multiplying the present value of the investment by 1 plus the interest rate (or expected growth rate) rose to the number of periods (dependent upon the future date being used).

Tax basis is your cost for assessing how much you owe in taxes, and is determined by multiplying your gains by your tax rate.

What is Cost Basis? For accounting purposes, the cost basis is the amount invested at the time of asset purchase. That is subtracted from the sale price to determine the commensurate capital gain or capital loss generated by the investment’s impact on the overall portfolio.

What are revenues? Revenue is the amount of money a company brings in after they’ve accounted for returns and discounts and such. It’s just what was brought in; it doesn’t account for costs that have to go out.