Online investment guide since 2001
Investing, explained in plain English.
A free encyclopedia of investing, finance and economics. Clear definitions, honest sources, interactive explainers, and never a word of buy-or-sell advice.
44 terms and growing · browse the full A-Z
Term of the day
Recession
A recession is a significant, broad and persistent decline in economic activity. A common shorthand is two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP, though official definitions are broader.
Browse by topic
Eight knowledge clusters, from first principles to the people who shaped the markets.
Investing Basics
The foundations: what investing is, how markets work, and the core concepts (risk, return, compounding and diversification) that every other term builds on.
Stocks & Equities
How shares of companies work: what a stock is, how it is valued, how it trades on an exchange, and the vocabulary used to describe equity markets.
Bonds & Fixed Income
Debt instruments explained: bonds, yields, coupons, credit ratings and how interest rates move fixed-income markets.
Funds & ETFs
Pooled investing: mutual funds, index funds and exchange-traded funds, how they are built, what they cost and how they differ.
Crypto & Digital Assets
Descriptive explainers of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, tokens and the terminology of digital-asset markets.
Economics & Markets
The bigger picture: inflation, interest rates, central banks, recessions and the economic indicators that move markets.
Personal Finance
Money concepts outside the market: budgeting terms, credit, savings vehicles, retirement accounts and tax vocabulary, explained, never prescribed.
Famous Investors
Biographies of the investors and business leaders who shaped modern markets, a tradition on Investing Value since 2001, when this site published its first investor profiles.
Recently reviewed
All terms →Definition
Yield
Yield is the income an investment produces per year, expressed as a percentage of its price: dividends for stocks, interest for bonds, rent for property.
4 min read
Definition
Price-to-Earnings (P/E) Ratio
The price-to-earnings ratio compares a company's share price with its earnings per share, describing how many dollars investors currently pay for one dollar of annual profit.
4 min read
Definition
Market Capitalization
Market capitalization is the total market value of a company's outstanding shares: share price multiplied by the number of shares. It is the standard yardstick for company size.
4 min read
Definition
Interest Rate
An interest rate is the price of borrowing money, expressed as a percentage per year. Central-bank policy rates anchor all the others.
4 min read
Definition
Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA)
Dollar-cost averaging is an investing approach in which a fixed amount is invested at regular intervals, regardless of price, so purchases average out across market highs and lows.
4 min read
Definition
Diversification
Diversification is the practice of spreading investments across different assets, sectors or regions so that no single holding can dominate the outcome of a portfolio.
4 min read
We explain, we never advise
Every entry is descriptive. No buy or sell calls, no return promises, no “top picks”. Just how things work.
Sources you can check
Figures and claims carry references, and every entry shows when it was last reviewed.
A guide since 2001
InvestingValue.com has been an online investment guide for over two decades. See our editorial policy.