Leverage ratios—like most financial metrics used by investors to evaluate companies—are most useful when comparing two or more companies within the same industry. Different industries have ...

But Archimedes never worked on Wall Street, and he wouldn’t recognize what today’s inventors of financial products are doing in the name of leverage. Leverage in the financial world can lead ...

Archimedes was a Greek mathematician, physicist and inventor born sometime around 287 B.C. in the Greek colony of Syracuse in Sicily. He is known to this day for his statement: “Give me a lever ...