- What Is a Bond?
You may have heard that a balanced investing portfolio includes both stocks and bonds, with the ratio between the two varying depending on your age and risk tolerance. Most financial advisors will recommend increasing the proportion of bonds in your investment… read more…
- What Is a Mutual Fund?
A mutual fund company pools money from individual investors and invests it, charging each investor a fee for the convenience of having someone else manage their investments. Investing in a mutual fund is an alternative to hand-selecting individual stocks and… read more…
- What Are Penny Stocks?
Every once in a while you hear about some lucky person who got rich by trading penny stocks. And we’re happy for those people – we really are. But for the average investor, penny stocks are risky business. Let’s talk… read more…
- What Is an Index Fund and How Do They Work?
Index funds are popular with those who want to take a slow-and-steady approach to investing. Brokerage firms that offer index funds are able to charge lower fees for index funds because they put fewer hours into managing them. Index funds don’t… read more…
- How Does the Stock Market Work?
As an outsider, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the stock market. News coverage of markets is often dramatized with images of brokers hollering across a trading floor, a litany of unfamiliar terms and lingo, and the threat of a catastrophic crash hanging over the proceedings. But despite all of this noise, the… read more…
- What Is a Stock Split?
You may have read about stock splits in the news. Big, successful corporations sometimes split their stocks multiple times to boost their shares outstanding. Other times they do the opposite: At the end of July 2021 recovering industrial conglomerate General Electric announced a 1-for-8 reverse stock split. But what do these kind of moves actually… read more…
- A Guide to U.S. Stock Indices
The Dow is up and the NASDAQ is down, but the S&P is unchanged. These terms get tossed around by everyone, from television pundits to politicians to people on the street. Many people assume they are representative of the stock market as a whole, while others think they represent the state of the economy. Understanding what these… read more…