Financial assets

Companies are cut into millions of identical pieces. Buy one and you own that fraction of the whole thing — the factories, the patents, the profits, and the problems.

Stock, share, equity: same thing, three words. "Shares" usually counts the pieces, "stock" usually names the thing, "equity" is the formal term. Nobody will correct you at a party.

Owning a share makes you an owner, not a lender. That's the whole difference from a bond.

The price rises and you sell for more than you paid — a capital gain. Or the company posts you a slice of its profits while you hold — a dividend.

Mature, profitable companies tend to pay dividends. Fast-growing ones usually keep the cash to grow faster. Memestocks frequently do neither.

Total return = price change + dividends. Judging on price alone undercounts the boring payers.

A fund pools money from many people and buys a basket of assets. Buy one share of the fund and you own a sliver of everything in that basket.

An ETF (exchange-traded fund) is a fund that trades on an exchange like a normal share — buy and sell it any time the market is open. Most ETFs are index trackers: they mechanically hold whatever is in an index rather than paying someone to pick.

The cost is the ongoing charge, the TER, taken as a small yearly percentage of your holding. It's quiet, automatic, and compounds against you — so it's worth checking.

One trade, instant diversification. That's why a world ETF is the most common "boring core" on the platform.

A bond is a loan you can trade. A government or company borrows from you, pays interest on a schedule (the coupon), then repays the face value on a fixed date (maturity).

Because the payments are contractual rather than hopeful, bonds swing far less than shares — which is exactly why they sit at the calm end of the risk scale.

The risk isn't zero: the borrower can default, and inflation can quietly eat the value of fixed payments.

Shares = ownership and upside. Bonds = a promise of fixed payments, and a queue ahead of shareholders if things go wrong.

This one trips up everybody, and it's just arithmetic. Your bond pays a fixed coupon. If new bonds start paying more, nobody wants yours at full price — so its market price drops until the yield matches.

Duration measures how hard that hits: it's roughly how many years' worth of payments you're waiting on. Long-dated bonds move much more for the same change in rates than short-dated ones.

Rates up → existing bond prices down. Longer bond → bigger swing.

Currencies are always quoted in pairs, because a currency only has a price in terms of another one. In EUR/USD, the euro is the base and the dollar is the quote: the number says how many dollars one euro buys.

If the pair rises, the base got stronger. Currency moves also leak into everything else you own — a foreign holding can gain in its home market while losing you money once converted.

You already have currency exposure the moment you own something priced in another money.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are the established networks with the longest track records. "Alts" is everything else — younger, thinner, wilder. Memecoins are jokes with a price attached; sometimes the joke pays, usually it doesn't.

Unlike a share, there's no company, no earnings and no balance sheet underneath. The price is pure supply and demand, which is why it moves the way it does.

Firal reflects that with hard risk floors instead of pretending volatility alone captures it: BTC and ETH can never score below 5, other alts below 6, and memecoins are always 7.

The honest question isn't "will it moon?" — it's "what percentage of my portfolio survives if this goes to zero?"

Gold, oil, copper, wheat. They produce no earnings and pay no dividend — the entire return is whatever the next buyer pays, so valuing them is a different game from valuing a company.

Most people hold them through funds rather than by taking delivery of a warehouse of copper.

No cashflow means no P/E, no dividend yield, and no balance sheet to read. Supply and demand only.