sekretaria magazin 6/2018

ANZEIGE BUSINESS ENGLISH Financial News If you don’t work in finance you may never read the financial pages, especially not in another language! Let us help guide you through the peculiarities of the financial section. A s we noted above, if you work in finance you will need to be aware of figures, trends and news in the world of finance, so the financial pag­ es will not be foreign to you. However, many of us ignore the financial pages, assuming that one needs specialized knowledge to read and under­ stand the rows of numbers and the articles. In fact, the information really concerns all of us, as we all have to manage money. As with any specialized area, there is of course jargon. And without un­ derstanding the basic words and terms it will be impossible to understand much in the financial pages. It’s all history Once you do begin to read the financial pages, you will find the figures start to make sense (if they didn’t at first) and become more and more interesting. But remember that they are all his­ torical: by the time they are printed in a paper (or even given online, unless it’s a live feed), the numbers will most likely have changed, so the in­ formation you are given is only useful for getting a perspective on how a share or commodity is far­ ing in general and the figures may not be relevant when it comes to buying or selling. Learning what’s what Different exchanges use different formats and conventions – some may provide sections bro­ ken down by industry, then alphabetically within the industry, others do not bother and just list all companies alphabetically. Some of the major ex­ changes are: » LSE London Stock Exchange » NYSE New York Stock Exchange » NASDAQ, also in New York » Japan Exchange Group in Tokyo » Hong Kong Stock Exchange » Euronext based in Amersterdam, Brussels, Lis­ bon, London and Paris Then there are the indices, such as: » the FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 100 which is the Financial Times selection of 100 largest companies trading on the LSE » the Dow Jones, which provides a price-weight­ ed average of 30 stocks traded on the NYSE » the S&P Global 100, which tracks 100 multi-national companies The useful thing to remember here is that the numbers are the same in any language! Choose an industry, a company or even an ex­ change or index that interests you and start with that. Track the figures daily or weekly, read what you can about it, do some research so that you can work out whether the numbers look good compared to this time a month ago or a year ago, and continue with your tracking as long as you can, until you feel you have a good understanding of what is happening and what the perspectives are. You can then enlarge your tracking to include another company, industry, exchange or index and compare them, giving you an even fuller un­ derstanding of how the financial markets work. ¶ Nicht lange überlegen müssen: Fit sein in Business English! Jetzt 14 Tage kostenlos testen! Danach nur 12,95 € im Monat. www.business-english.de Autorin: Anita Gera 17 www.sekretaria.de ENGLISH AT WORK