Purpose: Finance is portrayed as a complicated area of study. Hollywood shows finance as a fast paced industry where people are doing deals everyday and billions of dollars are moving between accounts and investors minute by minute. This is half true. Your average investor probably has a full time job in a different field and is investing to retire, buy a house or pay off school loans. The purpose of this page is to help the average person understand finance. It is not meant to be investment advice in any way. There are plenty of other websites like investopedia.com and they do an excellent job of describing finance subjects. This website is "just the facts" and nothing more.

Why am I doing this? I got an MBA with a concentration in finance and was unhappy with the way finance was taught. We spent more time programming excel than reading annual reports or understanding the nature of the business the company was in. At the end of the day investing is about knowing and understanding a business or an asset. I also have ADHD so having a professor muddy up what I think are simple concepts made learning everything more difficult. As a side note I think finance is a great career for fellow ADHD'ers. There are multiple ways to choose a stock and build a portfolio. I take the non-statistical/excel approach, much like Warren Buffet or Ben Graham. To help me better understand finance and the economy, I write a monthly newsletter that covers different aspects of finance, business, and the economy. Sign up if you're interested. I will also post tips for learning and understanding finance and the economy.

I will be adding to this almost daily.

Basic Definitions:

Stocks: you can think of stocks as pieces of ownership in a publicly traded company Bonds: fixed income product that is essentially a loan to a company, government division, or other entity

Market: a place in real life or on line where people go to buy and sell items

Stock Market: a place where you can buy or sell stocks, bonds, exchange traded funds (ETFs), mutual funds and other financial products. The most famous stock market is the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). There are others such as the Nasdaq and London Stock Exchange.

Portfolio: a collection of stocks, bonds, and other products owned by a person company or other entity

You may want to know what is the purpose of investing is. In basic terms people invest to make more money. If you buy a share of Coca Cola (KO) you are hoping that the stock increases in value and that Coca Cola continue to pays a dividend.

Dividend: money a company send you periodically for owning its shares.

Risk: is anything that has a negative impact on your investments or assets. There are a bunch of definitions but I like to keep it simple. There are economic risks, natural disaster risks, policy risks, etc. The list of risks can on forever.

I will be adding to this almost daily.

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