Stocks, Options and Bonds

A TIPS bond ladder can provide inflation-risk free retirement income. We will be using TIPS with 30-year maturity to build a bond ladder that generates $10K a year in inflation-adjusted real income for the next 30 years. TIPS and other bond types are described in detail in our blog “Bond Types.” TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Security) […]

A comparison of maturity term, coupon rate, risk rating and tax treatment of bonds issued by the U.S. Government, its agencies and corporate. We explained bond fundamentals in our blog “How a Bond Works.” Here we compare the different bond types. U.S. Government bonds are issued by the Treasury, States or Agencies. They are high-grade

A bond is a fixed income financial instrument with complex characteristics. We reviewed the high-level characteristics of bonds in our blog “Types of Asset Classes” and compared its performance to other asset classes in “Asset Classes 30-Year Performance History.” In this blog, we provide a more detailed view of how bonds work. Companies usually issue

Stock and Call/Put options are combined to implement advanced trading strategies such as Covered Call, Married Put, Long Straddle and Spread. In the “Call and Put Options” blog we reviewed how basic stock options work. In this blog, we will use these options to build more complex derivatives that cater to specific trading strategies. Covered

Calls and Puts are the most common types of stock options. Call is a bullish bet the buyer makes on the stock, while Put is a bearish bet. Options allow you to participate in the price movement of the underlying asset with a much smaller investment than owning the asset outright; this is akin to

Yahoo Finance has free tools to create and monitor portfolios. Morningstar’s portfolio analyzer, the X-Ray tool, allows you to disaggregate your portfolio into its component measures (such as asset classes, style maps, sectors, geography, financial metrics and position overlap). Yahoo Finance allows you to create your portfolio and track its growth at both the individual

Fundamental stock analysis using financial metrics usually published alongside a stock price chart. Let us go over the financial metrics that usually accompany a stock chart with Apple stock as an example from Yahoo Finance. Apple’s stock ticker is AAPL and is listed on Nasdaq, one of the two major stock markets in the U.S.