What is Investing?
What is Investing? How Does Investing Differ from Saving? Investing is the proactive use of your money to make more money or, to say it another way, it is your money working for you. Investing is different from saving. Saving is a passive activity, even though it uses the same principle of compounding. Saving is more focused on safety of principal (the amount you start out with) and less concerned with return. Your focus in investing is on return and can run the spectrum from conservative to very aggressive in terms of risk. One way you measure results is by the expected return weighed against the anticipated risks. It is easy to slip into an unnecessarily complex discussion about whether a particular financial transaction was an investment or a savings deposit. However, it is important to understand that investing has some distinctive characteristics, which separate it from pure savings. Since we are discussing stocks, I’ll limit the characteristics to that type of investment: Ownersh...