An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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From the category archives:
Financial Swagger
I can across this dope website Mint which is an online application for budgeting your finances. We compare your bank accounts, credit cards, CDs, brokerage, and 401(k) to the best products out there. The Mint application helps with reaching your saving goals not matter your income flow, regular (weekly) or irregular (large sum monthly). Its defintely worth taking a look into there services, you can check their site out… HERE
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I have a problem with too much money. I can’t reinvest it fast enough, and because I reinvest it, more money comes in. Yes, the rich do get richer.
Robert Kiyosaki
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To rap up our Stepping Up Your Financial Swag: Understanding Stocks Tutorial, we will look at how to actually read a stock table/Quote, check it out:
Any financial paper has stock quotes that will look something like this:
Columns 1 & 2: 52-Week High and Low – These are the highest and lowest prices at which a stock has traded over the previous 52 weeks (one year). This typically does not include the previous day’s trading.
Column 3: Company Name & Type of Stock – This column lists the name of the company. If there are no special symbols or letters following the name, it is common stock. Different symbols imply different classes of shares. For example, “pf” means the shares are preferred stock.
Column 4: Ticker Symbol - This is the unique alphabetic name which identifies the stock. If you watch financial TV, you have seen the ticker tape move across the screen, quoting the latest prices alongside this symbol. If you are looking for stock quotes online, you always search for a company by the ticker symbol. If you don’t know what a particular company’s ticker is you can search for it at: http://finance.yahoo.com/l.
Column 5: Dividend Per Share – This indicates the annual dividend payment per share. If this space is blank, the company does not currently pay out dividends.
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Every day we partake in a seamless economic system. We go into the market place and apply for home loans, invest in stocks and bonds, make deposits into our checking and savings along with partaking in a host of other financial services. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself why is the financial system structured the way it is, or when did this system come about? Well if so here is a bit of history of our financial system from investopedia, check it out:
The roots of what are now commonplace activities - such as buying stocks, bonds, and even things like applying for a loan or balancing a portfolio - is the “evolution” of the various economic systems that have supported them. The development of economics across time and continents is neither uniform, nor complete. This article will focus on the systems that have led to our current Wall Street arrangement.
Tooth, Nail and Plants
In the black hole known as pre-history, humans established a complex system of community that includes elements of labor, reward and trade. This eventually included the domestication of plants and livestock, furthering the scope of tradeable goods as well as tying people to the land so economies could develop. The uneven development of ancient economies suggests that many systems were attempted, but the profusion of empires suggests that the rule of powerful elite was the most successful in the early going.
The Spaces Between Empires
The most telling fact about humanity in the ancient world is that when the external controls of a ruler were removed, people reverted to subsistence farming. Although there is only one official dark age in the history text, the disconnected ancient world used to go through dark ages much like the blackouts and brownouts that ripple across energy hungry states. In these dark areas, the people went back to securing enough food for themselves and surviving until the next powerful figure came along to claim them as his own.
Feudalism
Up until the twelfth century, less than 5% of the population of Europe lived in towns. Skilled workers lived in the city but received their keep from feudal lords rather than a real wage, and the farmers were essentially serfs for landed nobles. It took the Black Plague, one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, to shake up the system significantly. By killing scores of people in both town and countryside, the various plagues of the dark ages actually created a labor shortage.
Nobles fought to hire enough serfs to keep their estates running and many trades suddenly needed to train outsiders, as entire guild families were wiped out. The advent of true wages offered by the trades encouraged more people to move into towns where they could get money rather than subsistence in exchange for labor. As a result of this change, birth rates exploded and families soon had extra sons and daughters who, without land to tend, needed to be put to work. Child labor was as much a part of the town’s economic development as slavery was part of the rural life.
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God always takes the simplest way. God does not play dice. God may be subtle, but he isn’t plain mean.
Albert Einstein
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Now that we have covered the different types of stocks, we will now define a few key stock related terms provided by Investopedia that will help you get a better overall understanding of stocks, trading on the stock market and reading stock tables/quotes, check it out:
First up is Ticker Tape, unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 30yrs I know you have seen a ticker tape before; you might not have understood what you were looking at as it was flashing across the screen, but I know you have came across one before.
Ticker Tape:
What Does Ticker Tape Mean?
A ticker tape is computerized device that relays financial information to investors around the world, including the stock symbol, the latest price and the volume on securities as they are trade.
Explaining Ticker Tape: Often times when you are watching certain news channels or channels that have financial related content, at the bottom of the screen you will see a ticker tape scrolling information on different companies stock.
Dividend:
What Does Dividend Mean?
1. A distribution of a portion of a company’s earnings, decided by the board of directors, to a class of its shareholders. The dividend is most often quoted in terms of the dollar amount each share receives (dividends per share). It can also be quoted in terms of a percent of the current market price, referred to as dividend yield.
Also referred to as “Dividend Per Share (DPS).”
2. Mandatory distributions of income and realized capital gains made to mutual fund investors.
Explaining Dividend:
Dividends may be in the form of cash, stock or property. Most secure and stable companies offer dividends to their stockholders. Their share prices might not move much, but the dividend attempts to make up for this. High-growth companies rarely offer dividends because all of their profits are reinvested to help sustain higher-than-average growth.
Dividend Yield:
What Does Dividend Yield Mean?
A financial ratio that shows how much a company pays out in dividends each year relative to its share price. In the absence of any capital gains, the dividend yield is the return on investment for a stock. Dividend yield is calculated as follows:
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Being that 90+% of all wealthy individuals invest in the stock market, I think that its very important for those who aspire to be wealthy grasp a basic understanding of stocks and reading a stock table/quote.
The Basic Stocks are Common Stocks and Preferred Stocks:
What Does Common Stock Mean?
A security that represents ownership in a corporation. Holders of common stock exercise control by electing a board of directors and voting on corporate policy. Common stockholders are on the bottom of the priority ladder for ownership structure. In the event of liquidation (the selling of the company), common shareholders have rights to a company’s assets only after bondholders, preferred shareholders and other debt-holders have been paid in full.
Explaining Common Stock:
If the company goes bankrupt, the common stockholders will not receive their money until the creditors (those who the company owe) and preferred shareholders have received their respective share of the leftover assets. This makes common stock riskier than debt or preferred shares. The upside to common shares is that they usually outperform bonds and preferred shares in the long run.
What Does Preferred Stock Mean?
A class of ownership in a corporation that has a higher claim on the assets and earnings than common stock. Preferred stock generally has a dividend that must be paid out before dividends to common stockholders and the shares usually do not have voting rights.
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Be thankful for what you have; you’ll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don’t have, you will never, ever have enough.
Oprah Winfrey
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Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we’ve rolled almost everything back into the company.
Bill Gates
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