When you buy stock, you own equity – that is, you are actually buying partial ownership of a company in the form of shares. The percentage of the company’s total shares that you own is how much of the company you own – for example, if the company has 100 shares and you buy 50 of them, you own 50% of the company. This means that you share the company’s ups and downs: if the company does well, your stock becomes worth more than what you paid for it, and you make a profit, but if the company does badly, its stock decreases in value, and you suffer a loss. Equity holders are last in line among creditors if the company’s value goes to zero. This is why the stock market always has a certain amount of risk attached: you can never know for sure what’s going to happen to your stock.
With bonds, on the other hand, you virtually always know exactly what you’re going to get. Bonds are not shares, so they don’t give you any ownership. Rather, when an institution wants to raise money, it sells bonds, which are like IOUs; they’re basically promises to pay your money back later, with interest in the meantime. The interest rates are usually fixed, so you can calculate your profits. For example, a company could sell you a bond for $1,000, and under the terms of the agreement, you’d get 5% of that $1,000 every year for the next ten years, and then your original $1,000 back at the end of that decade. Of course, this means you’re only going to make a profit of $500 over ten years, but you are guaranteed that money. If the company goes bankrupt, bond holders are usually first in line to be paid among those owed money. So people who prefer bonds like the security they offer, and people who prefer stocks like their potential to make their owners an incredible profit in the future.
One final note – there are three main types of bond: government, municipal, and corporate. Government bonds are sold by the government, municipal bonds by cities, and corporate bonds by companies. Government bonds are the most secure, followed by municipal, then corporate (because a company is much more likely to go bankrupt than a government is). However, because corporate bonds are the most risky, they also offer the highest rates of interest.
Tags: bonds, investing, stock market, stocks