Today's marketplace contains an amazing variety of mutual funds from which to choose. You can navigate this often-bewildering array of choices with confidence as you learn the key categories of differentiating them, including assets, goals, balance of growth vs. value, and diversification.

Gain the analytical tools to intelligently navigate the wide ocean of choices faced by anyone contemplating an investment in bonds. This lecture guides you through the three critical issues that can help shape your selection: default risk, inflation protection, and how your earnings may be taxed.

Now that you understand the many investment products out there, it's time for practical decision making about turning your financial planning into financial reality. Grasp how to shape your investment choices to match your retirement plans and how to turn those investments into income for living expenses when you do reach retirement.

Zero in on the whole point of investing: reaching a particular goal or goals you've decided on. This lecture uses the calculating tools you've already learned to show you how to plan for your retirement, but its techniques can be applied to any financial goal you set for yourself.

Economies are deeply complex systems. The marketplace involves many economic actors behaving in rational and irrational ways, sustaining a dizzying array of interconnected activity. Because of the number of participants involved, the unpredictability of their actions, and the sheer variety of possible actions, some degree of economic uncertainty is inevitable. In one of the most dramatic displays of economic uncertainty in our times, a wave of toxic...

Learn how this relatively new option for investors differs from mutual funds and about the advantages they may have over mutual funds for those making investments outside of tax-advantaged plans such as 401(k)s. You also learn what depository receipts are, and the key role they play in ETFs.

In this first lecture about bonds - with the focus on a "buy-and-hold" strategy - grasp the variety of available bonds and the features most important to an investor: who issued them, whether they are secured, and the timing of payments. You also learn how to "ladder" your holdings for a consistent income stream.

The glamour of initial public offerings can obscure their realities. This lecture explains how most IPOs are done, the "Dutch auction" method that is sometimes used instead, and what you need to know if you get the opportunity to participate in an IPO.

Selling an investment - whether a winner or loser - can be emotionally difficult. In addition to learning why this is so, grasp the different reasons that selling is often the right decision, and learn some techniques that can help offset emotional influences.

The cliché is that high risk brings the potential of high returns. But you learn in this insightful lecture that the cliché isn't true as you explore the two ways risks are classified and the very different expectation of potential rewards that come with each.