[MUSIC] Hi there, you may be thinking, why am I choosing this course for? Well, it's called Understanding Financial Markets. So at the end of the course, you'll be able to know everything, well almost everything, about financial markets. And you'll be able to explain to your family and friends what the Finance section of your newspaper is all about. In which case, you might be confronted through their doubting that finance is actually something highly interesting to them. And they may say, they may argue, hey, I think this is a bit dry and boring. Well, I'm going to show you it's not. So please follow me. [MUSIC] Hey you, are you interested about financial markets? Would you like to understand everything about it? Well just follow me and actually you know why. You know what? Yes. [LAUGH] There's a lot of animals, there's lots of companions we can talk about when we look at the financial markets. Well, the most common example we know, is bulls and bears. If you like the market, if you think it's going up, you're bullish, why? Well, because bulls, when they walk into the arena they look upwards, they're proud, okay? So bullish meaning going up. If you're bearish, you know bears, they walk like this and they look at their feet. So, if you're bearish, it means you see the market going down, okay? But there are other examples, less known. You'll see what we mean when we talk about central banks. And we can say that they can lead the donkey to the fountain but they cannot force it to drink. Actually, this is the French expression but in English we actually say you can lead a horse to the river but you cannot force it to drink. We'll see what we mean by that. But we also talk about cats and dogs. You will see what we mean when an investment is not performing very well. We talked it about a dog or indeed, it has a sort of bounce and then dies out again, we'll talk about dead cat bounce. What else do we have in terms of animals, menagerie, when we talk about finance? Well, we actually have doves and hawks. This is when we talk about central bankers. And some of them belong to the category of doves and some others belong to the category of hawks. And we see what that means. But, last but not least, we have a very interesting example of animals and the menagerie of the world of finance, and this is swans. You know that swans normally are white, but there can be some black swans. In fact, you know what, I think I saw one. Where is he? Somewhere around here I saw him. There he is, there he is. You see, that's a black swan, okay? So a black swan in finance is actually something you don't want to have because it's a very unlikely event, but if it happens it has a very nasty consequences. So we'll talk about black swan when we talk about gold for instance and the cases of hyperinflation. Something which has a very low probability of happening but if it does happen, then it has very, very ugly consequences. So, just to show you, we've a few examples of these animals that finance can actually be very lively and fun. And you'll be able to tell some nice and funny stories to your friends and family. [MUSIC]