Stocks and Cycles

• If you are new to investing and want to begin to understand stock market fundamentals, this course will help familiarize you with some common terms and concepts surrounding investments.

• This lesson will help familiarize you with some common terms and concepts surrounding investments, such as capital, types of investors, equilibrium, risks and diversification.

• This lesson examines how fluctuations in the growth path of the economy can favor the fortunes of one sector over another. It also looks at the different stages of growth and what happens during each.

Fundamentals

We'll walk through basic fundamental accounting concepts covering Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Statement of Cash Flows, using available company data in TWS.

• Balance Sheet: Investors and analysts might spend hours crawling through a company’s quarterly and annual statements searching for clues about how well the firm is doing. This lesson explains several commonly reported items on most firms’ balance sheets and helps the viewer understand the relative importance of such concepts to investors.

• Income Statement: What a company produces creates revenues. But to do so inevitably means incurring costs. How can investors sift through financial statements to find a single measure of how the firm’s strategies are translating into profits? For that, we look at the income statement.

• Cash Flows: For a company to grow it must generate stronger cash flows over time. It may make profits, pay dividends and accrue assets, yet in order to increase dividends, develop products, reduce debt, or buy back its own shares it must fuel such growth by raising increasing amounts of cash flow through the organization.