What is the NASDAQ?

The NASDAQ is a global electronic financial market where securities are bought and sold. However, more often the term is associated with the NASDAQ Composite, a benchmark index which gathers more than 3000 stocks listed on the Exchange, including some of the world most famous technology and biotech firms, like Apple, Google or Amazon. This …

What is a Lender of Last Resort?

A Lender of Last Resort (LLR) is an institution, usually a country's Central Bank (like the Federal Reserve in the United States), that offers loans to banks or other organizations that are having financial difficulties or that are near a collapse or a bankruptcy. Generally, LLRs borrow money to those companies or financial institutions whose …

What is a dividend?

  Dividends are the part of a company's earnings directly distributed to its shareholders. Their distribution and quantity is decided by the board of directors and approved by the assembly of the shareholders and they can be issued as cash payments (the most common case), additional shares or other types of assets. Dividends can be structured as to be distributed as a periodical ongoing cash flow …

What is the intrinsic value of a share?

The intrinsic value of a share is the actual and correct value of a stock, based on the fundamentals of its issuing company. Besides the fundamentals of the firm, which are the numerical values written in its financial statements, the intrinsic value includes in its calculation also other aspects of the business, both tangible (for example, …

What is a share?

A share (or stock) is a security that gives the buyer part of the ownership of the issuing company. Moreover, a the owner of a share can also have the right to claim a part of the earning gained by the enterprise, which might be distributed among shareholders as dividends. There are two types of shares: common and preferred. The first ones usually allow …

What is a financial bubble?

A financial bubble is an economic period in which the prices of particular types of assets increase in an exaggerated way, strongly exceeding their intrinsic value, only to contract later, when the bubble burst. It is usually originated by an exuberant bullish market and it ends when no more investors or speculators are willing to …

101 Inflation

We all hear talking about inflation, but how does it really work? It is define as the rate of change of prices, and the change can be more or less fast (if it is really high we are talking about hyperinflation); positive or negative (deflation). If we have a little amount of inflation it doesn't …

Gary S. Becker: Human Capital

Human capital refers to the stock of knowledge, habits, social and personality attributes, including creativity, embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. "Schooling, a computer training course, expenditures on medical care, and lectures on the virtues of punctuality and honesty are capital too in the sense that they improve …