Private Investment Funds For Wealthy Individuals: Hedge Funds use pooled capital from accredited investors in order to generate an active return. Hedge fund managers can employ a handful of different strategies with the goal of achieving high returns. The term "hedge fund" can be confusing because Hedging is actually the practice of attempting to reduce risk, yet most hedge funds these days have the opposite goal of maximizing return on investment. The first hedge funds in existence did try to hedge … [Read more...]

When Publicly Traded Companies Report Quarterly Earnings: Earnings Season is a period of time when the majority of publicly traded companies release their earnings reports. Generally speaking, each earnings season begins about 1-2 weeks after the end of each quarter. So companies will typically release their reports in early-mid January, April, July, and October. There is no official start or end to earnings season, but it usually lasts about 5-6 weeks. Overall, there's actually not much time … [Read more...]

A Bear Market is characterized by securities prices falling, anticipation of losses, and widespread pessimism. The typical causes of such pessimism is a weak or slowing economy, high unemployment rate, limited disposable income, reduced business profits, and/or tax rate changes. Overall, there is a major drop in investor confidence for one reason or another. A 20% drop from a peak in one or multiple broad market indexes (S&P 500, DJIA, NASDAQ, etc.) over a 2-month period of time or longer is … [Read more...]