Numbers dressed up in fancy suits pretending to be words.
The accounting practice of acknowledging that everything you own is slowly becoming worthless, which is depressing when applied to assets and relatable when applied to your car. It's basically writing a slow obituary for office furniture.
A tax deduction that allows businesses to subtract expenses from their taxable income, famously misunderstood by everyone thanks to that one Seinfeld episode. Half the population thinks a write-off means something is free, which keeps accountants employed correcting people at parties.
To use something that already exists rather than building something new, which sounds strategic but usually means "we have no budget." The Swiss Army knife of corporate verbs -- it can mean literally anything.
A 12-month accounting period that doesn't have to match the calendar year, because apparently regular years weren't confusing enough. Companies pick fiscal years like kids pick team names, seemingly at random and with no regard for anyone else's convenience.
Return On Investment, the single most asked-about metric in any boardroom, and the one most likely to be fudged in a PowerPoint presentation. Every executive wants to know the ROI, and every department has a creative interpretation of what counts as a return.
The theoretical money trapped inside your walls that everyone talks about but you can never actually touch without borrowing against it. It's like Monopoly money that your house keeps score with.
How wildly a stock's price swings up and down, which is finance's polite way of saying buckle up. High volatility means your portfolio could be worth a fortune at lunch and a used Honda by dinner. Day traders love it. Cardiologists recommend against it.
Everything you own minus everything you owe, a number that for most millennials can be expressed as a negative sign followed by their student loan balance. Forbes publishes a list of people with the highest net worth annually, presumably just to ruin everyone's day.
A financial statement showing what a company owns, what it owes, and the mathematical miracle required to make both sides equal. It's called a balance sheet because it has to balance, which it always does, even if the accountant had to get creative at midnight.
Buying a company using mostly borrowed money, which is the corporate equivalent of buying a house with no money down except the house is a billion-dollar company. The acquired company often ends up paying for its own acquisition, like making someone pay for their own kidnapping ransom.
A company's profit divided by the number of shares, giving you the illusion that you personally earned that amount per share you own. It's the finance world's way of making enormous numbers feel personal and tiny numbers feel acceptable.
A loan you give to a company or government that they promise to pay back with interest, making you the bank for once. Bonds are considered safe and boring, which is exactly what your money deserves after what you put it through with crypto.
The total value of a company's shares, calculated by multiplying the stock price by the number of shares, which sounds scientific until you realize the stock price is based on vibes. A trillion-dollar market cap just means a lot of people collectively agreed on a very large imaginary number.
When a company tries to acquire another company against its will, which is basically corporate kidnapping with better lawyers. The target company's board will try every defense in the book, from poison pills to white knights, making it sound like a medieval fantasy novel with spreadsheets.
A brief recovery in stock price after a steep decline, named after the morbid observation that even a dead cat will bounce if dropped from high enough. Wall Street has always had a way with words, and this particular gem proves that financial analysts shouldn't be allowed to name things.
A bond from a company with a credit rating so low it's essentially an IOU written on a napkin. They offer higher interest rates to compensate for the very real possibility that the company might not exist next year. Wall Street rebranded them as "high-yield bonds" because junk sounded too honest.
Interest earning interest on itself, which Einstein allegedly called the eighth wonder of the world, though he probably never had a credit card balance. It's magical when it works for you and absolutely devastating when it works against you.
How quickly you can turn an asset into cash without losing value, which is finance's polite way of asking how fast you can run to the ATM. Your checking account is highly liquid; your collection of vintage Beanie Babies is decidedly not.
The process of spreading the cost of something over time so it hurts a little bit every month instead of a lot all at once. It's the financial equivalent of eating an elephant one bite at a time, except the elephant is debt and you're never not eating.
The investment strategy of not putting all your eggs in one basket, which is excellent advice until you have to figure out how many baskets to buy. It's how financial advisors tell you they don't know what will go up, so they're betting on everything.
Two consecutive quarters of economic decline, or as economists love to debate, maybe it's a vibe thing. During a recession, everyone becomes an armchair economist and suddenly has strong opinions about GDP, none of which are correct.
The income an investment generates, expressed as a percentage that makes everything sound reasonable until you do the actual math. A 5% yield sounds great until you realize your $1,000 investment earns you enough for a mediocre dinner for two.
Money spent on big-ticket items that a company will use for years, like equipment, buildings, or that espresso machine in the CEO's office. Accountants love CapEx because they get to depreciate it over time, which is basically financial foreplay.
A collection of investments that you constantly check at 2 AM like a new parent checking on a sleeping baby. Financial advisors will tell you not to look at it every day, which is excellent advice that nobody in the history of investing has ever followed.