Cash flow is what happens to cash when a customer pays a bill, when your business buys supplies, or when you pay an employee or an independent contractor. Cash moves into your business when you receive a payment, and then out again when you pay expenses.

A capital gains yield is the rise in the price of a security, such as common stock. For common stock holdings, the CGY is the rise in the stock price divided by the original price of the security.

Bonds are commonly referred to as fixed-income securities and are one of the main asset classes that individual investors are usually familiar with, along with stocks (equities) and cash equivalents.

Two features of a bond—credit quality and time to maturity—are the principal determinants of a bond's coupon rate.

There are four primary categories of bonds sold in the markets.

Blue chip companies have reputable brands that have been built and maintained over many years. That and the fact that they have weathered multiple downturns in the economy make them stable companies to have in a portfolio.1

More accurately, they are shares of high-quality companies in healthy financial condition that have withstood the tests of time.

Developed in 1973 by Fischer Black, Robert Merton, and Myron Scholes, the Black-Scholes model was the first widely used mathematical method to calculate the theoretical value of an option contract, using current stock prices, expected dividends, the option's strike price, expected interest rates, time to expiration, and expected volatility.

The Black-Scholes equation requires five variables. These inputs are volatility, the price of the underlying asset, the strike price of the option, the time until expiration of the option, and the risk-free interest rate. With these variables, it is theoretically possible for options sellers to set rational prices for the options that they are selling.

Options traders have access to a variety of online options calculators, and many of today's trading platforms boast robust options analysis tools, including indicators and spreadsheets that perform the calculations and output the options pricing values.

REST is a software architectural style to which APIs conform so developers can interact with services in a standard way. GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries. REST and GraphQL are similar in that they identify resources as URLs through which the app can fetch data or functionality—but there are many differences:

As most software developers no doubt know, there are two primary models for API design: RPC and REST.

You might expect that gRPC and HTTP would be mutually exclusive, since they are based on opposite conceptual models.

The least-commonly used API model is REST—only a small minority of APIs are designed this way, even though the word REST is used (or abused) more broadly.

Investors look to broad indexes as benchmarks to help them gauge not only how well the markets are performing, but also how well they, as investors, are performing

A benchmark is a standard or measure that can be used to analyze the allocation, risk, and return of a given portfolio.

Indexes represent various investment asset classes. A benchmark can include broad measures, such as the Russell 1000 or specific asset classes like U.S. small-cap growth stocks, high-yield bonds, or emerging markets.1