Financial Domain Expertise

Equity is typically referred to as shareholder equity (also known as shareholder's equity) which represents the amount of money that would be returned to a company’s shareholders if all of the assets were liquidated and all of the company's debt was paid off. Equity is found on a company's balance sheet and is one of the most common financial metrics employed by analysts to assess the financial health of a company. Shareholder equity can also represent the book value of a company.

A commodity is a basic good used in commerce that is interchangeable with other commodities of the same type. Commodities are most often used as inputs in the production of other goods or services. The quality of a given commodity may differ slightly, but it is essentially uniform across producers. When they are traded on an exchange, commodities must also meet specified minimum standards, also known as a basis grade. They tend to change rapidly from year to year.

Fixed income is an investment that returns a payment to you on a regular schedule. Fixed income is a type of investment security that pays investors fixed interests payments until its maturity date. At maturity, investors are repaid the principal amount they had invested. Government and corporate bonds are the most common types of fixed-income products. In the event of a company's bankruptcy, fixed-income investors are paid before common stockholders.

A whole loan is a single loan that a lender has issued to a borrower. Whole loan lenders commonly sell their whole loans in the secondary market to buyers such as institutional portfolio managers and agencies. One reason lenders sell whole loans is to reduce their risk. Instead of holding a loan for 15 or 30 years and hoping that the borrower will repay the money, the lender can get the principal back almost immediately by selling it to an institutional buyer. Whole loans are issued by lenders to borrowers for multiple purposes.

Risk analysis is the process of identifying and analyzing potential issues that could negatively impact key business initiatives or critical projects in order to help organizations avoid or mitigate those risks. Organizations must understand the risks associated with the use of their information systems to effectively and efficiently protect their information assets. Risk analysis can help an organization improve its security in a number of ways.

Quantitative finance is the discipline of using mathematical models in order to help make investment decisions. In a lot of ways it is related to economics but the work is done from more of an applied perspective. Quantitative finance is the use of mathematical models and extremely large datasets to analyze financial markets and securities. Common examples include the pricing of derivative securities such as options, and risk management.