Hughes Reef

1) Hughes Reef is the land formation in the South China Sea, only above water in low tide, where China has created a 14-football-field-sized island to aid its claims to ownership of the important shipping channel and airspace.
2) "Subprime" credits in the personal loan market are defined by Equifax as having credit scores lower than 680 on a scale from 300 to 850
3) Labor force participation rate is the share of the population either working or looking for work. In the US, its shrank to 62.9% from 66% between 2007 and 2014. 4) This past December, 3.6% of jobs were unfilled, the highest vacancy rate since 2001--this rate is much higher than in 2007 (recession), suggesting current workers may not be suited for available jobs.

Manspreading

1) "Manspreading" is the male act of taking up too much space on public transportation, needlessly using seat space that could be occupied by others
2) Cost of goods sold (COGS) is accounted for by taking the initial inventory, adding purchases of inventory, and subtracting the ending inventory.
3) Inventoriable costs are all "expenditures directly or indirectly incurred to bring inventory to its existing condition and location." Some freight costs that do not result in "bringing inventory to salable condition" do not constitute inventoriable costs.

Pink sheets

• "Pink sheets" refer to a daily publication compiled by the National Quotation Bureau (NQB) of bid-ask spreads for OTC stocks. Companies "on the pink sheets" (they switched to an electronic medium in 1999) do not need to meet minimum SEC requirements; they are therefore seen as more risky investments because of lower barriers to entry in the marketplace.
• Standard deviation of prices in a marketplace works as a stand-in for measurement of risk in a market. That is, over increasingly shorter terms, the risk of movement and the risk of large swings are both bigger on average in markets where returns do not cluster as well around moving averages.
• It is interesting to note, however, that appearances of risk are a function of time. Over time, using a buy and hold strategy, it can be very advantageous to own high-risk investments in a growth environment. It's this continued world growth that makes stocks, over time, create higher returns.