It’s hard to make an entertaining and interesting film about the stock market for the masses, many filmmakers have tried (Margin Call, Rogue Trader, The Wolf of Wall Street, etc.), but most of them failed to attract an average person.

There are two groups of market participants: institutional and retail investors. Contrary to popular belief, the majority of market participants aren’t small and independent individuals but large institutional investors who manage massive capital. In this article, we’ll explain the difference between institutional and retail investors with some examples.

There are two main types of stocks on the public market: common and preferred. Why do we need to have two distinct types of shares and what’s the difference between them? In this article, we’ll take a look at these two types of stocks (shares) to figure out which one would be a better choice for an investor.

We all used to recognize companies by their names but there are many other ways to identify a particular company. Every company needs a so-called “ticker symbol” in order to be tradable on a stock exchange. Apple Inc, an American IT giant is also known as “NASDAQ: AAPL” and Nestle SA, a Swiss conglomerate, is also known as “SWX: NESN”.

What is a successful trade? Well, we may say that any trade that generates profit might be considered well executed and it’s usually done by buying some asset, waiting for its value to appreciate and then by selling it for a higher price.