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Posted by: stephen t on 2007-09-29, 06:44:17
First of let me congratulate you on an excellent career choice, pharmacy, high demand and good pay. They should be teaching basic business concepts in in high school. I would not take biz courses undergrad, well you could as electives, but if you are getting your MBA you really don't need it. I would recommend you start off with watching MSNBC and articles in yahoo finance, or MSN money. I would look up terms you did not understand. Lastly there are a lot of good books on business, I would read something by Warren Buffett or Peter Lynch, stay away from Suze Orman. Oh, and Samuel Adam's Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and Graham and Dodd's book on value investing are classic must reads. I enjoy business and follow it every day and it is a lifetime pursuit of mine, there is no reason why you cannot self-learn a lot. Here are some essentials to get you started. The Fed, also know as the Federal Reserve System, was created in 1913, current chairman Ben Bernanke, prior long time chairman Greenspan. Why is this important? The Fed can change the money supply and raise or lower certain interest rates, which can either stimulate or slow the economy. The Dow, Nasdaq, and the Amex. These are the United States stock exchanges. When people refer to the Nasdaq or Dow they usually mean a basket of stocks from each exchange that make up an index. There are important foreign exchange like the Nikkei, Japan, Dax, German, Ftse, England, Cac, France, Hang Sen, China and so on. Large Cap, Mid Cap, Small Cap companies. This mean the size of the company. Cap means capitalization, which is equal to stock share price multiplied by number of shares. Exxon, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart would be large cap stocks. P/ E ratio. Price to earnings ratio. A P/ E of 10 means for every 1 dollar of earnings the stock is priced at at a multiple of 10 times, so a company that earned $3, had a P/ E ratio of 10 would be priced at $30 a share. If speculation is that a company will grow real fast investors will be paying more for the stock, such as say Google, and it will have a much higher P/ E than a slow growth stock like Coke or Exxon. Inflation. This is when prices go up and eats the value of a dollar. For example, a Corvette in 1964 was $4,000, today a new Corvette is like $40,000 or more, this is inflation. High inflation can ruin an economy, the Fed is always looking at price increases. A little inflation is normal. Inflation is related to interest rates, money supply, business activity, wages, and consumer spending. If the Fed lowers interest rates this tends to increase inflation because money is cheaper, but it stimulates the economy. From 2000-2005 the Fed kept lowering interest rates to keep us out of a recession, but this also led to the housing bubble, and huge inflation in housing prices. Recession this is when the economy stalls and shrinks, causing unemployment to rise, and other bad things. OK, my favorite business word, which I will let you look up, stagflation. |
