A “Poison Pill” creates a strong defense mechanism for a “targeted takeover company” allowing the company to properly identify legitimate and beneficial acquisitions and weed out the actions of corporate raiders. The “Poison Pill” is also useful in slowing down the speed of potential raids.

A straddle is an investment strategy that involves the purchase or sale of an option allowing the investor to profit regardless of the direction of movement of the underlying asset, usually a stock.

An oligopoly is characterized by a small number of sellers who dominate an entire market.

Monopoly, in economic terms, is used to refer to a specific company or individual has a large enough control of a particular product or service that allows them to influence it’s price or certain characteristics.

Monopolistic Competition is characterized as a form of imperfect competition.

Money supply is the total amount of money available in an economy at any particular point in time.

Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) is an investment theory whose purpose is to maximize a portfolio’s expected return by altering and selecting the proportions of the various assets in the portfolio.

Gross Domestic Product, or as it is most often simply referred to as ‘GDP’ is the combined value of ALL goods and services produced within a given country in a given time period.

Fiscal policy is the use of government spending to influence the economy.

The Expected Return is a weighted-average outcome used by portfolio managers and investors to calculate the value of an individual stock, or an entire stock portfolio.

A good way to evaluate a manager is to ask many relevant questions pertaining to your own personal financial situation and your financial goals. Examples of questions to ask are:

Elasticity is one of the most important terms in economics, and has a plethora of uses. Economists define elasticity as the ratio of the percent change in one variable to the percent change in another valuable.

If you own a bond or manage a bond portfolio, chances are that will you be following daily interest rates. You know that bond prices increase when rates rise, and decrease when rates fall. But how do you measure the bond’s price sensitivity to such rate fluctuations? The answer is duration.

Dupont Analysis breaks the Return on Equity into several different components in order to analyze where the returns are coming from.

Direxion Small Cap Bear3X – Triple-Leveraged ETF is an index fund ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) designed to seek a daily result of 300% of the INVERSE of the performance of the Russell 2000 Small Cap Index.

Straight line depreciation is the most commonly used and simplest form of depreciation.

Depreciation refers to the gradual and permanent decrease in value of the assets of a firm, nation or individual over its lifetime.

A consumer price index (CPI) is the relative measure of a market basket of consumer goods and services purchased by households.

Stocks with a very small market capitalization. Small caps definition varies but generally it is a company with a market capitalization between $300 million and $2 billion.

A basic material used in manufacturing or commerce that is interchangeable with other the same commodities coming from a different source. The quality of a specific commodity may differ slightly, but it is essentially uniform across producers. When they are traded on an exchange, commodities must also meet specified minimum standards, also known as a basis grade. Typical types of commodities are corn, gold, silver, steel, etc.