Clarify Microsoft's explanation of MIRR
The MIRR formula uses the finance rate to discount negative cash flows, but since the only negative cash flow in the example in in the current period, there's nothing to discount.  It's meant to solve problems with IRR like when there are both positive and negative cash flows, which can result in multiple answers for IRR.  The example they give isn't a good one for MIRR because it's a simple spend now, earn later scenario, which IRR is perfectly fine for. If you add a negative cashflow somewhere after the first one you'll see the answer change with difference financing rates. The value does change from 12.61% to 13.48%. The difference between re-investing cashflows at 14% vs 12% is not big enough to change the rounded value. Edit: The initial cashflow is discounted at t0, meaning it's already equal to its present value and the finance rate doesn't have an effect. It does impact future outgoing cashflows, as you've noted.
If you want to invest in the Windows Phone, then you go and find out who makes the Windows Phone i.e. Microsoft. Then you go and decide if Windows Phone is successful will the share price of Microsoft go up (own research/deduction) and if you think that the price of Microsoft has a positive correlation with the Windows Phone, then you could buy shares of Microsoft. There is no way to invest directly in individual products on stock exchanges, you are generally investing in the companies that produce them. You find the ticker of a company by googling. NASDAQ: MSFT Virtually all of Facebook's users also use Windows (either at home or at work). Microsoft charges money for Windows licenses, lots of money. You can make the same analogy for Microsoft's Business division (Office products). Facebook's valuation is getting comparable to Microsoft (ex-cash stockpile). It is absolutely ridiculous. Google is the dominant online advertiser, and Google's profits is not even close to what Microsoft makes. Only a small fraction. Even if Facebook meets all future expectations and becomes the dominant online advertiser, making the same amount of money as Google, it still doesn't deserve that $100B valuation today, as it will take years before it gets up there. Facebook may be an amazing product, but collecting hundreds of dollars per license renewal is simply a better business than an ad-supported model. In order for advertisers to pay Facebook $100/user (the type of money Microsoft makes), the users must be buying thousands of dollars more stuff because of Facebook ads. That's not possible, especially with other methods of advertising all competing. "I know plenty of guys out of college looking to get a start. There's a common problem: ""Hey? Know anyone looking for work?"" Me: ""Do you need experience?"" Them: ""Um... yeah..."" Some of them are very good developers  Microsoft is one of the better companies, though they have other issues. Most of them won't even bother if you are right out of college. I wish more invested in training programs to find those star workers to get them into coding and out of McDonalds. I'm finding consulting companies are starting to take the place of this, and that's how I got my start  Microsoft did interview me a few times when I got out of college, but my communication skills were lacking then. Nowadays, after I got my start, people are starting to come to me." The hours you list are all over the place.  Is it 40 hours/week or 65-80?  You best clarify it during your interviews.   My only tip is familiarize yourself with:   http://gipsstandards.org/   They may not use it, but at least know what the industry standard is. Typical BI story.  No original content- just commenting on an actual piece of journalism which they found elsewhere on the internet.  In short- it's blogspam.  [Here's the original ZDNet article](http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/firefox-faces-uncertain-future-as-google-deal-apparently-ends/4241) they're using as the sole basis for their article. It might mean Equal Weighted based on Market cap, rather than Price?  For instance, All of MSCIs indexes are based on security's market cap, but then a factor is applied to give them equal weights once a quarter.  From then on, weights will fluctuate based on market cap performance.    Edit.  Not sure why down voted, but you can check here http://www.msci.com/eqb/methodology/meth_docs/MSCI_Equal_Weighted_Indices_Methodology_May11.pdf  So each quarter weights are set to be equal, but then between quarters the weights fluctuate due to performance "With my current, limited knowledge (see end), I understand it the following way: Are share prices really described as ""memoryless""?  Yes.  Is there a   technical meaning of the term? What does it really mean? The meaning comes from Markov Models: Think of the behavior of the stock market over time as a Markov Chain, i.e. a probabilistic model with states and probabilistic transitions. A state is the current price of all stocks of the market, a transition is a step in time. Memoryless means that transitions that the stock market might make can be modelled by a relation from one state to another, i.e. it only depends on the current state. The model is a Markov Chain, as opposed to a more general Stochastic Process where the next state depends on more than the current state. So in a Markov Chain, all the history of one stock is ""encoded"" already in its current price (more precisely in all stock's prices).  The memorylessness of stocks is the main statement of the Efficient Market Theory (EMT). If a company's circumstances don't change, then a drop in its share price is going to be followed by a rise later.  So if the EMT holds, your statement above is not necessarily true. I personally belief the EMT is a good approximation - only large corporations (e.g. Renaissance Technologies) have enough ressources (hundreds of mathematicians, billions of $) to be able to leverage tiny non-random movements that stem from a not completely random, mostly chaotic market.  The prices can of course change when the company's circumstances change, but they aren't ""memoryless"" either. A company's future state is influenced by its past. In the EMT, a stock's future state is only influenced by its past as much as is encoded in its current price (more precisely, the complete market's current state). Whether that price was reached by a drop or a rise makes no difference.  The above is my believe, but I'm by far no finance expert. I am working professionally with probabilistic models, but have only read one book on finance: Kommer's ""Souverän investieren mit Indexfonds und ETFs"". It's supposed to contain many statements of Malkiel's ""A Random Walk Down Wall Street""." Fuck managerial accounting to death. Anywho, I'm not sure what they mean by the variance being higher or lower in the budget. Variance in principle is the discrepancy from a budget and actual.   I'll try to answer this from what I can see.    The budget variance in this problem is unfavorable for Busy Community Support, mostly caused by a significant underestimating of your salaries expense in the budget.