Derivatives
There was a time when shorting shares was as complicated as you could get on the stock market. Nowadays, the financial whizzes have come up with many different ways that you can trade on the price of, well, virtually More...
Trading Commodities
One of the largest speculative markets is the commodity market. This includes the “futures” market, although you can have futures contracts on other things such as stocks nowadays. Commodities cover More...
How Forex Trading Works
Forex Another huge market is the Forex or foreign exchange market. It has not been in existence for the speculative trader as long as the stock markets, mainly because currency exchange rates used to be fixed, but More...
Bear Market
A “bear market” doesn’t mean businesses instantly start losing money forever. They usually coincide with periods where profits might temporarily be less (that’s how the business cycle works, More...
Federal Reserve starts taper – and avoids Wall Street Crash
A week or so ago the US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that “tapering” would begin. As this is a situation which has not been seen before, opinions varied on what the impact of it would More...
Bitcoin’s Crash on China
You may remember our discussion of the volatility of Bitcoin just over a month ago, and recent events have shown how true our worries were. In case you have not heard, this week China took some actions which caused More...
Russia bribes Ukraine
Russian president Viktor Yanukovych is giving $15 billion of Russian financial aid and a one-third discount on energy imports to help support Ukraine. In the deal Russia will be cutting the price it charges Ukraine More...
October’s nonfarm payrolls: 204000
The nonfarm payroll is an important statistic for United States. It is usually reported monthly on the first Friday of the month, but because of the government shutdown in October it was reported this time on the More...
The Twitter IPO
At the end of the week when Twitter went public, there was a sigh of relief at Goldman Sachs, the bank that led the IPO. Fittingly, the sigh was expressed in the form of a tweet ‘Phew’ by the lead banker, More...
BlackBerry bid collapse
Investors in BlackBerry are having a wild ride. The shares have slumped 16% in the last couple of days, following news on Monday that the proposed takeover by Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited was off the table. More...