Stocks
What owning a share of a business means, where the price comes from, and how ordinary shares differ from preferred ones.
20 articles
Sector Growth Over the Year: What a Sector Index Measures and What It Does Not ShowThe site compares sectors over the year by the change in their sector indices: for each sector a basket of its securities is taken, the basket's value is combined into an index, and the value on the current date is compared with the value on the same date a year earlier.5 min
Management Stock Option Plans: Where the Shares Come From and Who Pays for IncentivesA management stock option plan is a way of paying executives not with the company's cash but with a stake in it: a manager receives the right, several years later, to buy shares at a price fixed in advance, or to receive the shares themselves once certain conditions are met.5 min
LBO: whose money buys the company and whose balance sheet pays for itA leveraged buyout (LBO) is a transaction in which the buyer acquires control of a company largely with borrowed money, while the assets and cash flow of the acquired company itself become the collateral for that debt and the source of its repayment.5 min
Poison pill: diluting the acquirer's stake and the limits of the defence in RussiaA poison pill is a shareholder right written in advance that switches on automatically as soon as a hostile acquirer crosses an ownership threshold set in the company's corporate documents, making any further buying many times more expensive.5 min
Hostile takeover: how control is bought over the head of the boardA hostile takeover is the acquisition of control over a joint-stock company that bypasses its governing bodies: the buyer goes directly to the shareholders or to their votes without the consent of the board of directors and management.5 min
Reverse takeover: how a private company goes public through someone else's shellA reverse takeover is a deal in which a private company acquires public status by "moving into" a legal entity whose shares already trade on an exchange: on paper the public company buys the private one, paying with newly issued shares of its own, but so many of these shares are issued that control in the combined5 min
White knight: who buys a company out from under a hostile bidder, and what shareholders pay for itA white knight is a friendly buyer that the board of directors or a major shareholder of the target company finds on its own initiative once a hostile bidder is already trying to take the company over.6 min
Agency costs: what shareholders pay when someone else makes the decisionsAgency costs are the loss of value that arises when capital is controlled not by its owner but by a hired manager with interests of their own.5 min
Merger Synergy: Who Creates It and Who Captures It — the Buyer or the SellerSynergy is not the sum of two businesses but the difference between the value of the combined company and the value of the same assets held separately.5 min
The Most Traded Stocks on the Moscow Exchange: What Turnover Measures and What It Does Not ShowThe "most traded" stocks are the ones through which the most money passed during the trading day: turnover is calculated as the total value of all trades in an instrument, not as the number of trades and not as the number of shares that changed hands.5 min
Earn-out: how part of the deal price depends on what happens after closingAn earn-out is a deferred part of the deal price that the buyer pays the seller only if the company delivers pre-agreed results after closing.6 min
Top Stock Gainers of the Day: What a One-Day Rise Measures and What It Does Not PromiseThe top gainers list is not a selection of the best stocks but a sort: every traded share is ranked by its price change over the trading day, from the largest gain downwards.5 min
The Month's Biggest Stock Losers: How to Tell a Sell-Off from an Ex-Dividend DropThe ranking below sorts Moscow Exchange stocks by one single criterion — the change in price over a calendar month, from worst to best.5 min
The year's worst-performing stocks: what the ranking measures and what it cannot showThe list below sorts Russian stocks by their price change over the year, from the deepest drawdown to the shallowest.5 min
Index gains for the session: what the daily change measures and what it does not showThe list below shows the indices that rose over the current trading day, sorted by the size of the daily change from largest to smallest.5 min
Share Buybacks: One Word, Two Opposite Mechanisms7 min
Checklist before buying a stockThe point of a checklist is not to predict where the price will go, but to separate two different things: verifiable facts about the issuer and your own hypothesis about its future.5 min
The Stock Has Fallen: A Sequence of Questions Instead of PanicA price drop is not an event but the consequence of one, and you should act on the event.6 min
Quarter and Year: Why the Comparison Must Be With a Comparable PeriodA quarter is properly compared with the same quarter of the previous year, not with the preceding quarter: revenue follows a seasonal pattern within the year, and neighbouring quarters differ from each other not in how well the company performed but in where they fall in the calendar.5 min
Short Positions and Leverage: Why the Risk Works DifferentlyThe risk of a short position works differently not because it is "more aggressive" than a long, but because the subject of the debt changes: in a short you borrow not money but the security itself, and you must return that very security — whatever it is worth by then.6 min