Business journalism has a dialect, and nobody hands new readers a dictionary. These ten terms appear daily in the business section of this site and every financial page in the world. Learn them once and the coverage opens up permanently.
The price of money
A basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point, so fifty basis points means half a percent. Central banks move rates in these steps. Hawks and doves describe the people making those moves: hawks lean toward higher rates to control inflation, doves toward lower rates to support growth. When coverage calls a central bank statement hawkish, it is predicting costlier borrowing ahead.
The mood of the market
A bull market is a sustained rise, a bear market a sustained fall, generally meaning twenty percent from the recent extreme. A rally is a strong rise; a correction is a fall of about ten percent, the market's way of catching its breath. A sell-off is faster and angrier. None of these labels are official. They are shared shorthand for direction and mood.
The health of a company
Revenue is everything a company takes in. Profit, or earnings, is what remains after costs, and it is the number markets actually trade on. Guidance is the company's own forecast for what comes next, and it frequently moves the share price more than the results themselves, because markets price the future, not the past. When a stock falls despite record earnings, weak guidance is usually the reason.
The weight of debt
A bond yield is the return investors demand for lending, whether to a company or a country. Rising yields mean lenders see more risk or expect more inflation, and for governments they translate directly into costlier borrowing. Sovereign yields are among the most consequential numbers in any economy, because every other interest rate in the country stands on top of them.
Putting it together
Read tomorrow's business section with this key and notice how much decodes itself. A hawkish central bank lifts yields; higher yields pressure stocks; guidance tells you which companies expect to ride it out.
Financial news is not difficult. It is just written in shorthand, and the shorthand can be learned in an afternoon.
Clip this guide, and the markets column stops being a foreign language.
