What is the minimum investment in a typical hedge fund?
Hedge funds can require initial investments that are quite large. This may be somewhere between $250,000 to $10,000,000. They will generally only accept Accredited Investors, meaning high net worth individuals that pass SEC standards which exempt the fund from some reporting and disclosure requirements. While the minimum investment varies, most Hedge Funds will accept only so-called accredited investors. Continue reading...
What is a Keogh plan?
Keogh plans are any type of qualified plan at a sole proprietorship or partnership. Keogh plans come in various forms, and this is because they are actually quite a broad category. IRS Publication 560 (found here) divides workplace retirement plans into SIMPLE IRAs, SEP IRAs, and Qualified Plans. This last category, Qualified Plans, includes profit-sharing plans, 401(k)s, 403(b)s, money purchase plans, and defined benefit plans such as pensions and salary continuation plans. Continue reading...
What is a Loss?
A loss refers to reduction in the value of an investment, or in business terms, to having expenses outweigh revenues. In a company’s fiscal year, if their operating and total expenses outweigh their revenues, they are operating at a loss. If those companies are not supported by private capital and operate at a loss for too long, it can easily lead to bankruptcy or closure. Newer businesses often run at a net loss for the first few years, while they rush to build labor and capital infrastructure, with costs such as equipment, buildings, technology, employees, and rights. Continue reading...
What is a Credit Crunch?
A credit crunch is when access to liquidity dries up dramatically in rapid fashion, or becomes less accessible due to a spike in borrowing rates. Central banks will often step-in to try and curb the lack of liquidity by offering the markets access to cash at lower than market rates, in the event of a crisis. Perhaps the most famous credit crunch in history occurred in late 2007 and early 2008, when bank balance sheets became highly leveraged overnight due to mark-to-market accounting rules that were applied to the mortgage backed security portfolios on their balance sheets. Continue reading...
What is Future Value?
Future Value is the hypothetical value of an investment at a specific date in the future. The future value (FV) of an investment or business is a calculation used in several types of planning and accounting. In a Time Value of Money (TVM) calculation, the Future Value is often the starting point, and the interest rate that will be earned in the meantime is called Discount Rate, and is discounted by the number of years of periods back to the present time. This allows investors to see the Present Value (PV), which is a lesser, discounted amount from the future value, and gives us the premise for the Time Value of Money, which is that “a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow.” Continue reading...
What is the Federal Employee Retirement System (FERS)?
The FERS includes the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) and other benefits available to employees of the federal government. The eligible features of FERS may be different for the employees of different branches and agencies of the government. Civilian and military personnel are included in FERS. FERS is essentially comprised of the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP), which is a 401(k)-type plan for federal employees, and, in most cases, a Federal employee retirement annuity. The Thrift Savings plan has lower fees than most 401(k)s and offers several kinds of index funds to employees. Continue reading...
What are Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs)?
Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) are bond-like investments backed by debts such as mortgages. The mortgages or debt obligations are pooled together and divided into tranches based on the maturity date and coupon payments and sold as securities (CDOs). If interest rates change and the borrowers in the underlying pools can refinance their debts, the CDOs will experience some volatility as the obligations are paid off early, but how much volatility depends on which tranche the investment is in. Continue reading...
What is the Size of our National Debt?
The total United States national debt is $19.3 trillion as of fiscal year (FY) 2016. Total debt is near what the U.S. produces in annual GDP, and a majority of our national debt is public debt — money owed to those who have Treasury obligations. The U.S. also owes a large amount of money to foreign countries (foreign debt), but a majority of U.S. debt is held domestically. As of June 2012, the three countries who hold the most of our national debt are: Continue reading...
What was the Best Day for the Markets?
The best day for the markets, in terms of the largest single-day point gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was October 13th, 2008. It happened when the Dow closed up 936 points in response to seemingly positive news about the handling of the ongoing financial crisis. The market would fall much further however before the next uptrend began, on March 9, 2009. In percentage terms, the biggest gain for the Dow came on March 15, 1933, when the index shot up over 15% (8.26 points) in response to Franklin D. Roosevelt's (FDR) Emergency Banking Act. Continue reading...
Best Day Trading Guide
Day traders, by definition, trade on a very short-term time frame, seeking to generate profits by opening and closing positions hour-by-hour and having the majority of their positions closed by the end of the day. Short-term profits and income are the goals with most day-traders, and the term is used more and more for “amateur” traders who trade from home and treat it as their primary occupation without being part of a brokerage firm. Day trading has become more and more prevalent for independent, non-affiliated investors who trade from their computers at home for hours a day. Continue reading...