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Shares & funds
Slices of ownership in companies, and the wrappers that hold bundles of them.
A share is a claim on whatever is left of a company after everyone else has been paid: its lenders, its suppliers, HMRC. That residual position is why equities return more than bonds over long periods and why they fall further when things break.
Most people now own shares through a wrapper rather than one at a time — a fund, an ETF, a pension. The wrapper changes the tax, the cost and the liquidity, but not the underlying fact that you are last in the queue.
Exchange-traded funds
A fund that trades like a share, usually tracking an index for a few hundredths of a per cent a year — the most consequentia…
No. 045Ordinary shares
A claim on everything a company has left after everyone else has been paid — the last place in the queue, and historically t…
No. 037Investment trusts
Closed-ended funds that are themselves listed companies, which is why they can trade at a discount to the value of what they…
No. 050Private company shares
Ownership in businesses with no market, where the price is whatever the last funding round said it was until somebody proves…