Home
Stage Four
Stocks, Bonds, Cash & Alternatives
Part Two · The Landscape · Vol. IV

The Landscape.


You know yourself. Now meet the instruments. Stocks are residual ownership in a business. Bonds are loan contracts with a schedule and a due date. Cash is short-term optionality that slowly loses to inflation. Alternatives — REITs, commodities, crypto — are a small, optional flavour bucket. Eight lessons on what each one IS, how each one pays you, and why their correlations matter. Capstone: a one-page cheat sheet in your own words.

Lessons
8
Coins available
192
Badge
Coin Basics Complete

Table of contents

Eight lessons. Ends with your asset-class cheat sheet.

  1. 01

    What You Actually Own

    When you buy a share, what do you actually have a claim on?

  2. 02

    The Two Ways Stocks Pay You

    Price movement, dividends, and the full picture called total return.

  3. 03

    Bonds: Lending Money for Interest

    Face value, coupon, maturity — the anatomy of a loan contract.

  4. 04

    Why Bond Prices Move Opposite to Rates

    The single most common bond surprise for new investors.

  5. 05

    Cash & Cash Equivalents

    Savings accounts, money markets, T-bills — not the same product.

  6. 06

    Alternatives: REITs, Commodities, Crypto

    What the 'other' bucket actually contains — and what it doesn't.

  7. 07

    How These Assets Behave Together

    Correlation, diversification, and the only free lunch in finance.

  8. 08

    Your Asset-Class Cheat Sheet

    Capstone — the one-page reference you'll keep.

    Capstone
Ready?

Start with what a share actually is.

Four minutes. You'll leave knowing what you actually own the moment you buy one share — and what you don't.

Begin Lesson 01 →

Key terms

Plain-English definitions for every concept in this stage.