Radical Personal Finance, episode 21, on today's show, stocks, bonds and derivatives.

What do those words mean?

What are these financial instruments that we hear about so much?

How do they work and why should you care? Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast for today Wednesday, July 16, 2014.

Thank you for being here.

I've been looking forward to this topic. It's one of my favorite topics is basically to discuss and walk through the basics of stocks, bonds, and derivatives to really establish a foundational knowledge of what these financial instruments are so that you can

understand how to use them in your life to better your goals. A lot of times as a financial advisor I would spend time working with clients and clients would ask me questions about their investments, clients would ask me questions about their

their 401k is about markets or things like that and I always had this experience of

trying to answer their questions directly and with clients who were very financially literate, I found that it was easy and

fun to answer the question to kind of have a discussion. But I found that many clients did not

have a high degree of comfort or literacy with the basic terms and the basic things

that these words mean. When you talk about stocks or you hear about the stock market, there are

different pictures that come to everyone's head. And so we want to understand what are these words actually mean

so that we can have a really relevant idea of how to interpret the news, how to interpret what we read and what we learn about.

So on today's show I'm going to try to unpack and build a foundational knowledge of understanding

about stocks and bonds. And so I hope you'll enjoy it and I hope that it will be really valuable to you.

I think I'll probably be able to give you some information today that will be very relevant to your life,

whether that's your life as an investor in publicly traded securities,

or whether that's relevant to your life as an individual, with just some ideas about how you can use stocks

and bonds within your own business or as a wealth transfer mechanism or in other ways.

So we'll talk about that today. I'm pretty excited about it.

Before we do that, I just want to get into a couple of announcements and I want to lead off with announcement number one which is thank you.

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