The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak: The Terms You Need to Know to Talk Like Cramer, Think Like Soros, and Buy Like Buffett | Date: 28 April 2011, 08:07
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The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak: The Terms You Need to Know to Talk Like Cramer, Think Like Soros, and Buy Like Buffett
By Jack (edited by) Guinan
* Publisher: McGraw-Hill
* Number Of Pages: 352
* Publication Date: 2009-07-28
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0071624988
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780071624985
Product Description:
Have you ever used a stochastic oscillator?
Does your portfolio have spiders in it?
Do you really know what a derivative is?
From the creators of one of today’s most popular investing Web sites, The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak presents in-depth definitions of the site’s most searched terms.
Covering everything from the basics, such as asset, commodity, and index, to more advanced concepts like tranche, ebenture, and value investing, The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak takes you beyond the average dictionary definition with concise yet thorough encyclopedic explanations of terms and concepts. It also has about 50 hilarious cartoons—proving that the investing world does have its lighter side.
Keep The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak on hand for those key moments that can make or break an investment, like knowing when to straddle an option . . . and when to strangle it.
Investopedia was started in the summer of 1999. If you remember
your stock market history, our timing couldn’t have been worse. By
the time we had formally incorporated the business in February 2000,
we were at the peak of the dot-com bubble—not exactly the best
time to start a dot-com in the financial industry.
Nevertheless, we pushed on. We had grand plans to create the biggest
and best financial site on the Internet. It was going to be a bigger and
better version of the top sites that millions of investors and would-be
investors were visiting every day.
It didn’t take us long to figure out that our ambition far exceeded
the resources we had at the time. (At that point, Investopedia had
only two employees: us.) That being the case, we decided to focus
on something we could tackle. It turned out to be something that,
as university students, we were learning every day and had a passion
for. As we soon realized, it was also an area that almost every Web site
and publication to this day ignores or puts on the back page: financial
education.
At the time, we believed that if we started building our financial
dictionary, our company would develop the momentum it needed to
move on to bigger and better things. However, although we originally
intended to use financial education as a platform to launch us toward
the creation of more traditional financial content, the site continued
to evolve as a source of educational content and tools for individual
investors.
We didn’t know it at the time, but we had stumbled upon a niche that
nobody else was filling. Today we have an enormous database of content
devoted to helping individuals improve their financial IQ, including
a dictionary of more than 9,300 terms. It is, in our humble opinion,
the most comprehensive dictionary of its kind.
In addition to the dictionary, Investopedia boasts one of the Web’s
most popular stock simulation games and thousands of pages of
free educational content produced by more than 200 subject-matter
experts worldwide and supported by a team of analysts and editors at
our head office in Edmonton, Alberta.
As you read The Investopedia Guide to Wall Speak there are a few
things you should know about Investopedia and our philosophy:
1. We’re unbiased. One of our biggest pet peeves with the financial
industry is that so many of the “experts” out there are trying
to sell you something and so many of the talking heads in the
financial media offer a biased perspective. How are we different?
We have no financial products to sell, and so we can stay true to
what is important: explaining financial concepts so that you can
make your own decisions about what’s best for you.
2. Plain English and common sense reign supreme. We’ve yet to
meet anybody who has a need for the complex explanations in
financial textbooks. Investopedia provides simple definitions of
financial terms and concepts. Then we take it a step further by
cutting through the jargon and providing real-world examples
and interpretations. In the end, finance and investing are much
easier to understand when explained in plain English. Why do it
any other way?
3. No one cares about your money more than you do. It sounds
obvious, but how many people actually take control of their financial
futures? This isn’t to say that seeking advice from a financial
professional is a bad idea; in fact, many people can benefit
from having an advisor. But even with professional help on your
side, you still need to be equipped with financial knowledge that
lets you understand where your money is being invested. Only
then will you have the confidence to sit down with your financial
professional and ask the tough questions that will ensure that
your money (and your advisor) is working for you.
Why Finance Rules
Part of the reason Investopedia has become so popular is that in terms
of financial education for young people, there tends to be a huge
void. We’d rank finance and money as being as important as history,
health, math, and science. We all learn arithmetic, but how many of us
are taught to budget properly and manage a checking account? How
many high school graduates do you know who can explain the
benefits of compounding? In our opinion, understanding how much
you’ll make by investing at 10% for 10 years and knowing how much
interest you’ll pay by holding a balance on your credit card are some
of the most important lessons out there.
This country (if not the world) is guilty of some major financial mistakes.
This isn’t just Main Street we’re talking about; Wall Street has
made plenty of mistakes too. Therefore, we believe that the need for
financial education among young people applies not only to those
who might fall prey to adjustable-rate mortgages or credit card debt
but also to the Wall Street set who staked their futures on collateralized
debt obligations (CDOs), mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), and
other creations of financial engineering that have emerged over the
last few decades.
Similarly, there has been no shortage of talk about the world’s “credit
binge,” but this discussion rarely addresses what we view as the root
cause: lack of education. Just look at the credit crisis: A general lack of
knowledge extended all the way down the line, from the homeowner
who didn’t read the details of his or her mortgage document, to the
investment bank that sold it, to the institutional investor who bought
it, to the credit rating agency that rated it, and to the politician who
failed to regulate it. The common theme is that nobody really understood
these esoteric and exotic securities.
Much as the dot-com bust was a wake-up call for investors, we hope
that the silver lining of the current crisis is that we learned a collective
lesson: Wealth is not created by mountains of debt. It is the result of
hard work, smart investments, and the creation of goods and services
that make life better. That’s true for both individuals and nations. We
hope that Investopedia can play a role, albeit a small one, in preventing
future financial crises, whether personal or economic.
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