Introduction

Welcome to the world of financial markets and instruments. Whether you plan to become a finance major, you are currently a finance major, or you are taking this course for some other reason, we hope you will enjoy taking this journey with us. The authors have a passion for finance—for producing interesting new knowledge through our research and also for disseminating financial knowledge through our textbooks and teaching. We have written this book to be clear, concise, and easy to read–with you in mind. This chapter will contain a lot of vocabulary words. Finance has been called the language of business, and as such, we must learn some new terms before we can become fluent in finance. So without further ado, here we go!