Finance
Money, honey, Hard cash is all that counts.
Mergers and Aquisitions
some notes on whether you can profit for M & A. I'm not paying attention and will not be able to scalp when an announcement is made. Instead I am interested in post announcement. Often the target company's share price will spike higher upon announcement.
Risk Arbitrage - Profiting from Mergers, Acquisitions and Liquidations
How to decipher Broker Ratings and Stock Calls
Target price: fair price of the stock. The broker has calculated what the price of the stock should be. Also check if there has been a time frame mentioned, otherwise you can assume the price is for now.
Overweight:
Outperform: buy it
Buy: The current share price is cheaper than the target price. The broker recommends buying it.
Neutral:
Hold
Underperform:
Upgrades and downgrades
Glossary
Short Covering: buy stops on people who are short. This is the opposite of a stoploss for traders who are long.
ttm: trailing twelve months
Managed funds - what to look for
MER - management expense ratio, how much the fund manager is going to take each year (usually a percentage)
Comparison to the sector the fund is focussed on
Amount of turnover - excessive turnover generates capital gains (and more tax for you). Don't forget the biggest fee
Make sure its not a fund of funds, you will be paying expense ratios multiple times.
Psychology
China shares
A shares - companies incorporated in mainland China, listed in Renminbi. Only mainlanders and some insto can trade.
B shares - companies incorporated in mainland China, listed in foreign currencies on the Shanghai and Shenzhen markets.
H shares - listed on the hkse and elsewhere.
Inflation
Why do we want stable prices?. This article explains why inflation is targeted to 2-3%.
Indices
Indices give a good overview on a basket of stocks. I'm basing some of my portfolios around them.
To replicate you can buy a passive fund that attempts to mirror the index. Or build your own.
Weightings
Each constituent stock in the index can weigh a different proportion to another. A 10% increase in a large component and a 10% decrease in a small component will increase the index.
The data for exact proportions of the consistuents are not free. For free information I usually visit the iShares site for an ETF that tracks the index, and look at the proportions in the fund.
FTSE100
FTSE index company maintains the FTSE 100 and other indexes.
Weightings are calculated by float but fall into a band. Even though floated shares may change daily, the weightings are updated only in certain circumstances.
S&P 500
I can't find a list of investable weight factors.
For traders on the ASX, SPDR runs an ETF, and publishes % weightings of components in itsSPY ETF.
iShares runs the IVV S&P 500 Index Fund and also publishes % weightings.
ASX 200
SPDRs runs theSPDR S&P/ASX 200 Fund. Index holdings are published as a percentage to 2 decimal places
Futures are under the AP ticker on the SNFE
Money Market Fund
Taken from wsj - Money Market Funds explained
Finance links
AMP Oliver's insights is published most every couple of weeks. Available in a nice PDF format that you can download.
Financial Vizualizations - finviz.com has a very clean stock screener.
Google finance has a clean interface