Finance Glossary

A candlestick chart is a useful tool for understanding a stock’s behavior in the marketplace, and is often used to gauge investor sentiment. Each “candlestick” in the chart represents stock behavior for a particular day. The “body” of the candlestick is the space between the opening and closing price of the stock for that day. If […]

  Short selling refers to the selling of shares not owned by the seller, but are instead usually borrowed. Short selling occurs because an investor believes that the price of a stock will decline, essentially “betting against” a company. This makes short selling an inherently risky practice. Short selling usually begins with a trader borrowing shares […]

    A certificate of deposit (CD) is a low-risk investment consisting of a saving certificate issued by a commercial bank or other financial institution. A CD has a fixed maturity date as well as a fixed interest date. Generally speaking, the longer the CD has to mature (known as the “term”), the higher the interest […]

  In the stock market, small cap is short for small market capitalization. A particular company’s market capitalization refers to the current market value of its outstanding shares. Small cap is an approximation that can vary with time and from brokerage to brokerage, but generally speaking, a small-cap stock today has a market capitalization value […]

In investment strategy, asset allocation refers to choosing how much of your portfolio to dedicate to different asset classes. Asset allocation must be customized for the individual investor, and will depend on one’s goals, risk tolerance and time horizon. The way assets are distributed is considered one of the key aspects to successful investing and […]

  Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is a common investment strategy designed for secure, conservative investing over time. Here’s how it works: In DCA, an investor buys a fixed dollar amount of shares in a company over a particular period of time regardless of the share price.  This means that more shares are purchased when the price […]

In the news this week, Chipotle is still having a tough time recovering from blows to its reputation caused by food-bourn illness back in 2015. One indicator that Chipotle is doing badly is that it has had to expend exorbitant amounts of money in order to try to regain market share from competing restaurant chains, making […]

Anyone who lived through the late 90s knows there was a dot com bubble, and that it left many people in a lurch.. Same with the housing bubble that led up to the 2008 financial crisis. But what actually constitutes an economic bubble specifically?   A bubble is a type of economic cycle: it features […]

One measure frequently used to to describe behavior of a stock is volatility. Volatility indicates the dispersion of returns for a particular security, usually in relation to returns from the same security or a broader market index. In simpler terms, volatility expresses how much risk or uncertainty is associated with a stock’s value. The higher […]

The Dow, or the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), is the most watched stock index on the planet. It is a price-weighted average  tabulated from 30 high profile stocks traded on the NYSE and NASDAQ, including those of the world’s most influential companies. The Dow is such an important measure of market performance that both […]