Learn how to potentially increase your wealth and avoid making expensive mistakes with How the Stock Market Works. Professor Ramon P. DeGennaro, an award-winning professor in banking and finance at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, leads you through 18 detailed lectures that explain the stock market from the inside, introducing you to the factors that make company stocks rise and fall.
Begin the course by exploring the difference between beating the market and investing in it. One carries very high risk, while the other is a much safer strategy. Learn about the human propensity to look for patterns in everything - but are stock returns predictable?
Learn how stock is an outgrowth of simple business relationships. Use an ingenious analogy to compare two major types of securities: stocks and bonds. Both are ways to share the assets that a corporation owns and the cash that it produces - but with crucial differences.
The stock market may be high-tech and getting more sophisticated every year, but it is essentially like markets you already know, such as grocery stores and car dealerships. Armed with this insight, delve into the special features of stock markets and how they work.
Explore the relationship between the risk of investing in stocks and the return you can expect from owning them. Survey the average return on a broad portfolio of stocks held over many decades. Next, focus on the short-term volatility that makes many people understandably nervous.
Address the investment advisor's favorite question: Do you want to eat well or do you want to sleep well? Analyze your risk tolerance in simple role-playing games. Then investigate strategies for limiting risk and improving your odds of making money in the long run.
Learn the most important formula in investing - the simple equation for compounding earnings. Then focus on the three variables that determine how much money you'll have at the end of an investment. Most people worry too much about the one variable that they can't reliably control.
Delve into evidence that beating the market is hard even for seasoned professionals. According to the efficient market hypothesis, stock prices are almost always fair, with very few bargains available for sharp-eyed investors. Examine different scenarios and evidence that support this view.
Walk through the steps for choosing a brokerage firm, which can be as simple as going online and filling out an application or as involved as interviewing multiple firms to find the right fit. Analyze your needs, and dispel misconceptions that you may have about brokers.
Explore how stock trades are made. Then look at ways you can place orders tailor-made to your needs. For example, you can avoid the emotion of spur-of-the moment decisions by specifying in advance when to buy or sell a stock. Also learn the mechanics of short selling.
Review a range of useful trading strategies, and identify some common trading mistakes, such as confirmation bias, overconfidence, and loss aversion. Finally, survey the fascinating world of options, looking at cases when it makes sense to use them.
