Famous Traders & Investors
Charlie Munger is usually described as Warren Buffett’s right hand at Berkshire Hathaway, which is accurate as a job title and incomplete as a description of what he…
Taxes & Investing
You sell a stock at a loss to claim the deduction, and then you buy it back the same week because you still like the company. The Internal…
Beginner's Path
The number of common stocks listed on US exchanges is in the low thousands; the number an individual analyst can read with any seriousness in a working week…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
The cash flow statement is the third of the three core financial statements, alongside the balance sheet and the income statement, and in the analyst’s practice it is…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
A stock buyback, also called a share repurchase, is the transaction by which a company uses corporate cash to retire its own shares from the open market, reducing…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
The phrase insider trading describes two distinct activities that share almost nothing except a name, and the analyst’s first task on encountering the term is to determine which…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
A Dividend Aristocrat is a member of the S&P 500 that has raised its dividend in each of the past 25 consecutive years. The criterion is more demanding…
Taxes & Investing
Tax-loss harvesting is the practice of deliberately realising losing positions to offset capital gains in the same tax year, with the proceeds redeployed into similar-but-not-identical exposure. The strategy…
Taxes & Investing
The largest single expense in an active trader’s ledger, after the broker’s commissions, is the federal capital gains tax owed on realised profit. The same fifty thousand dollars…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
A Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) is a corporate structure, codified in U.S. tax law in 1960, that allows a company owning income-producing real estate to pass nearly…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
The income statement, also called the profit and loss statement or P&L, reports how much a company earned and what it spent over a defined period — usually…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
The balance sheet is one of the three financial statements that every publicly traded company in the United States must file with the SEC each quarter; the income…
Trading Strategies
Four times a year, every public company in the United States files a quarterly accounting of its operations, and during the two-to-three week window in which most of…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
The price-to-earnings ratio, or P/E, divides a company’s share price by its earnings per share over the most recent twelve months. It expresses, in a single figure, how…
Trading Strategies
Value investing is the practice of paying materially less for a security than a careful estimate of what the underlying business is worth, and the discipline rests on…
Famous Traders & Investors
Benjamin Graham’s mother lost the family savings in the Panic of 1907, when he was thirteen, and the household never recovered the standing it had held while his…
Famous Traders & Investors
In 1965, the common stock of Berkshire Hathaway changed hands at roughly $19 per share, approximately book value for a failing New England textile operation with almost no…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
Every price tick on every screen, from a one-cent move in Apple to a five-hundred-point drop in the Dow, is the visible output of a single mechanism: the…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
Due diligence is the analytical work performed on a company before capital is committed to its stock, and in equity research practice it is the substance of the…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
Fundamental analysis is the practice of valuing a stock by studying the underlying business rather than the price chart. Where technical analysis reads price and volume, fundamental analysis…
Stock Trading Encyclopedia
The New York Stock Exchange is the largest securities exchange in the world by aggregate market capitalisation of its listed issuers, with roughly 2,800 companies and a combined…