Financial Terms

What Are Interest Rate Swaps?An interest rate swap is a private agreement between two parties to exchange interest rate obligations for a specific period of time. Most often, one party has a fixed...

What’s an Interest Rate?An interest rate is the amount a borrower pays a lender to use the lender’s capital. It is typically given as an annual value or annual percentage rate (APR). The...

What Is An MACD? Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD), created by Gerald Appel in the late 1970s, is a technical indicator that generates buy and sell signals. Securities traders use it to...

What Is Inflation?Inflation is the rate at which prices rise or fall, over time. Since rising prices reduce the future purchasing power of the same amount of currency, this is an important component...

What Is Market Capitalization?Market capitalization, also known as market cap, is the total value of a company’s shares outstanding at a given moment in time. It is calculated by multiplying the...

What Is Gross Domestic Product? Gross Domestic Product, often referred to simply via the acronym GDP, measures the economic size of a country by calculating the monetary value of all the finished...

What Is Free Cash Flow?Free Cash Flow (FCF) is the excess cash a company generates that, after expenses are deducted, could be available to shareholders. It is the cash available once a company pays...

What is an Income Statement?A company’s income statement subtracts all expenses from all revenues to determine the business’s profit or loss for a specific period of time. The income...

What Is Technical Analysis?Technical analysis uses identifiable chart patterns and mathematical indicators, also called studies, to forecast market activity. It assumes that the collective opinion on...