Finance Abstract

Abstracts

The first article I read was about retirement. The article reasserted a lot if not all the points we hit on during the semester. It basically covered three different areas of retirement that need to be looked at seriously. The first being social security, which most of us know is looking very dim as far as our generation is concerned. The second was benefit plans offered by employers. And last was the savings that people accumulate until their retirement.

The article basically tried to set these three things up as the three legged retirement stool. As one might expect they pointed out that social security and employee benefits are weakening. So in order to keep ourselves propped up we must rely more on our savings to carry us through retirement. We must learn to put more time and effort in to our investments in order to guide us through a financially secure retirement.

The information in this article was very helpful and informative. However, pretty much everything in this article had already been discussed in class so I had already heard and understood everything that was presented. The stuff that was presented about social security, employee benefits, and savings was standard fare as far as retirement discussions and articles are concerned. As well as the talk about developing and investing your retirement nest egg as soon as possible. But the sheer number of times people encounter these facts is obviously not enough because I personally know a lot of people that are reaching retirement and realizing that they may have to look for another job. So I think the more places people encounter it the better maybe they'll start acting upon it sooner rather than later.

The second article I read was about how to decide what stocks to invest in. The article also listed several stocks to invest in that the author thought were going to grow considerably in the next couple of months. The companies mentioned were International Gaming Technology, Avon Products, Dell, Mittal Steel, Monsanto, and Expedia. What set these companies apart according to the author were their high return rates and their lower end risk versus reward ratio.

The second part of the article talked about how the author felt people were putting too much effort into trying to decide which stocks to pick to invest money in. He said basically you need to ask yourself only two questions. The first being: Is it a decent business? In other words how has it done in the past and will their product or service continue to attract costumers in the future. And the second question was: Is it reasonably priced? After asking yourself these two questions you can determine which stocks are ready for buying.

This article was not hard to understand at all everything was laid out in an easily understandable format. The stock market has always been somewhat of a mystery to me however; even I could understand how he was trying to simplify it down into simply picking a business which was steadily inclining in worth. As well as so reasonably priced so as to still have some room to grow so that you could get some return on your