What is the economy? Well let’s take a quick look at it, quick because the economy is very complex, however it can be said that there is a lot more to the economy than just money. In simple terms the economy is the way in which goods and services are made, sold, and used in a country or area.

Economics affects our daily lives in both obvious and subtle ways. Economics structures many choices we have to make about work, leisure, and consumption and how much to have in our savings. We are also influenced by macro-economic (branch of economics that studies the behavior and performance of an economy as a whole) trends, such as inflation, interest rates and economic growth. The U.S. is mostly a service economy which means that it has less manufacturing and more providing services for other people. For example we would design the apple IPhone but it would get manufactured in another place like China which is a major manufacturing economy. One of the great ways to measure the U.S. economy is the S&P 500.

The S&P 500 Index which stands for Standard & Poors 500 Index, is a list of the top 500 U.S. listed publicly traded companies. These are companies that can be traded by anyone in the market. People use it as a measure of how the stock market is doing. Purchasing a share of the S&P 500 is like purchasing a tiny portion of each of the 500 companies. The list of companies in the S&P 500 is very diverse, it includes things from technology to healthcare to utilities. The top ten companies include Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Facebook, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase, Visa and Johnson & Johnson. “For most people the best thing to do is to own the S&P 500 index fund.” - Warren Buffet