Like consumers, companies can take on too much debt. The debt-to-equity ratio offers one way to tell whether a leveraged business is taking on too much. Here's how you can do the simple math before you invest.
Unless you're ultra-wealthy or willing to chance the vagaries of the secondary markets, you can't invest yet in hot social networking companies like Facebook, Zynga or Groupon. But soon there may be an alternative: a new fund called NeXt BDC Capital that will take stakes in top-quality venture-backed firms like those.
Standard & Poor's is revamping its credit rating methodology for banks and financial institutions in a way that may cause about 40% of rated banks to get a downgrade, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The investment world's love affair with ETFs continued in 2010, as more than 1,000 funds managed assets of $940 billion. Here's a review of the best and the worst performers, and a few reminders about how to use these investment vehicles safely.
