Now, that being said, I am not saying that long term profitable system do not exist. There are plenty of people who are very successful at generating high returns on investments with both technical and fundamental analysis. However, the knowledge they use to do this is built up over numerous years and plenty of failed investments. The key is to understand that being successful will take plenty of research, a lot of time, and a readiness to fail and lose some money.

Dividends
A dividend is a lump sum payment made to shareholders usually every quarter or half year. It is usually calculated as a dollar amount per share owned; $0.01 per share for example. This dollar amount will usually change depending on the profitability of the company, and is decided by the company's board usually a month before it is paid.

Stock Splits
A stock split is simply when a company decides to split existing stocks up in order to lower the overall price of their shares without reducing the value of the shares an individual owns. Say for example a company has a share price of $120 and they announce a three to one share split. If you owned one $120 share you will now own three $40 shares.

Commodities

Commodities are normally raw products, such as oil, precious metals, food, and so on. The prices of commodities are heavily affected by the products scarcity. The majority of commodity is traded via the futures market, where investors essentially make deals to buy/sell the product at a later date and then close the deal out before the product is due to be delivered. We will explore futures in a later section.

Currencies

The Foreign Exchange, or Forex for short, is a market in which currencies can be exchanged. It is centred around the exchange rate, which is the rate that one currency can be exchanged at for another. On the Foreign Exchange, you will see that most often currencies are paired together. When you see a pairing such as EURAUD (Euro/Australian Dollar), it is showing the value that one Euro can be exchanged for into AUD. For example, if EURAUD is $1.8 then one Euro can be exchanged for $1.8 AUD. The image below shows the current daily chart for EURAUD in TradingView (taking data from OANDA). We can see that the value of the Euro has gone up significantly compared to the Australian Dollar due to the economic difficulties being brought about due to the Tariff situation happening currently.

Subjects

Intro to Quantitative Finance

Lessons

Financial Markets & Products