BUS 315

Where investing actually happens

Name: Business Tutor
Address: Burnaby, BC, CA
Telephone: +1-604-916-5838
Price range: C$30–C$129

What you can own, how shares are issued and traded, how an index is built, and what happens when you borrow to buy or sell shares you do not own.

Part 1 · Assets and markets · Step 1 of 12

Real assets make things. Financial assets are claims on them

Quillmoor Bakery owns land, a building, ovens and its recipes. These are real assets: they have productive capacity, so they make bread and income. To pay for them, the bakery sold bonds to lenders and shares to owners. Those are financial assets: claims on the income the real assets produce. A bond or a share does not bake anything.

Try it: Pick “The whole economy”. The investors' financial assets and the bakery's obligations cancel out. Only the real assets are left as wealth.

Look at it from

Raised by selling bonds$2M

all sharesmostly bonds

Real assets

$5M

Lenders (bonds)

$2M

Owners (shares)

$3M

The bakery's balance sheet: $5M of real assets, paid for with $2M of bonds and $3M of shares. Changing the mix changes who has a claim, not how much the bakery owns.

Real assets = $1M + $2M + $1.5M + $0.5M = $5M

What the bakery owns.

Bonds $2M + shares $3M = $5M

Every dollar of real assets is paid for by someone's claim.

Wealth = $5M real + $5M financial − $5M of claims issued = $5M

Add everyone up: the claims investors hold are what the bakery owes them.

Check yourself

A family buys $10,000 of Quillmoor's new shares, and the bakery spends the money on a new oven. Which one is a real asset?

Margin calls and short sales still feel backwards?

Bring your problem sets. We work through them together until every type feels routine.

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Where investing actually happens

Real assets make things. Financial assets are claims on them

Buying on margin: equity, a margin call and the return

Margin calls and short sales still feel backwards?

Questions, answered.

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