Section
Stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities: what moved, by how much, and the reason behind it, with every figure sourced and dated.
A bull market is a sustained rise; a bear market is a fall of 20 percent or more from a recent high. Here is what defines each, what drives them, and why the labels are confirmed only in hindsight.
A stock market index turns a whole slice of the market into a single number you can follow. Here is what the S&P 500, the Dow and the Nasdaq actually track, why their weighting differs, and why indexes shape your money even if you never trade.
A bond yield is the return a bond pays at its current price, and it moves opposite to that price. Here is how the seesaw works, and why the 10-year US Treasury yield, not the Fed, sets your mortgage rate.