Margin of safety is the gap between what you estimate a business is worth and the price you pay for it. If you believe a stock is worth $100 and you buy it at $70, your margin of safety is 30%. The gap is there to protect you when your estimate turns out to be wrong, which, sooner or later, it will be.

The idea comes from Benjamin Graham, who called it the central concept of sound investing. Seth Klarman later named his well-known book after it. Warren Buffett explains it with a bridge: if you build a bridge rated for 30,000 pounds, you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it. The extra capacity isn't wasted. It is the reason the bridge stays up when something unexpected happens.

For most established companies, a payout ratio between roughly 30% and 60% of earnings is considered healthy. That range leaves enough profit to keep the dividend safe and still fund growth. But "good" depends heavily on the type of business. A utility can sustainably pay out 70% or more. A fast-growing technology company might pay out 15%, or nothing at all, and still be well run.

The payout ratio is the share of a company's profit that it hands to shareholders as dividends. Whatever isn't paid out stays in the business, where it can fund new products, pay down debt or buy back shares. The question behind a "good" payout ratio is really this: does the company keep enough back to protect the dividend and keep growing?

Intrinsic value is an estimate of what a business is actually worth, based on the cash it can produce for its owners over the rest of its life. It is not the share price. The share price is only what someone paid for the last share that changed hands. When price and intrinsic value sit far apart, an investor wants to understand why.

The important word is estimate. Intrinsic value is never one exact figure. It is a range that moves with the assumptions you make about the future, and two careful analysts can reach different answers for the same company without either of them being careless.

Owner earnings are Warren Buffett's estimate of the cash a business could hand to its owners each year without weakening its competitive position. The figure starts with reported profit, adds back non-cash charges such as depreciation, and subtracts only the spending needed to keep the business where it is. Buffett has argued it is the figure that actually matters when valuing a company.

The dividend discount model, or DDM, values a stock as the sum of all the dividends it will pay in the future, translated into what that money is worth today. If you expect a company to pay a growing stream of dividends, the model tells you the most you could pay for the shares and still earn the return you want. It works best for steady, mature dividend payers and poorly for almost everything else.

Free cash flow is the cash a business has left after paying for its day-to-day operations and for the investment needed to keep and grow its assets. It is money the company could return to shareholders, use to pay down debt or put toward acquisitions without borrowing. Many investors trust it more than reported profit, because cash is harder to dress up than earnings.

A share buyback is when a company uses its own cash to buy its own shares from investors. The repurchased shares are cancelled or set aside, so fewer remain in existence, and each remaining share represents a slightly larger slice of the same business. It is one of the two main ways a company returns cash to shareholders. The other is the dividend.

A discounted cash flow, or DCF, is a way of estimating what a business is worth today from the cash it is expected to produce in the future. You forecast the cash the company will generate each year, reduce each future amount to reflect that money later is worth less than money now, and add the results together. The total is an estimate of intrinsic value: what the business is worth on its own terms, whatever the share price says.

A payout ratio is the share of a company's profit that it pays to shareholders as dividends. If a business earns $100 and pays out $40, its payout ratio is 40%. The number shows how much room a dividend has: how much profit is left after the dividend is paid, and how far profit could fall before the dividend comes under pressure.

A 13F is a report that large institutional investment managers in the United States must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission every three months, listing the US-listed shares they held at the end of the quarter. It is the reason anyone outside Berkshire Hathaway knows what Warren Buffett owns, and the source behind every "here's what the great investors are buying" article you have ever read.

CAGR stands for compound annual growth rate. It is the single yearly rate that would take a starting value to an ending value over a given period, as if the growth had been perfectly steady the whole way. Nothing ever grows that smoothly — which is exactly the point. CAGR strips out the year-to-year noise so two different investments, over two different time spans, can be compared on the same basis.

ROIC stands for return on invested capital. It measures how much profit a company earns for every dollar of capital put into the business — money from shareholders and lenders alike. It answers a question that revenue and profit figures never quite reach: is this a good business, or just a big one?

Some companies don't just pay dividends — they raise them. Every single year. For decades.

Those companies have a name: Dividend Aristocrats.

If you're building an income portfolio or looking for businesses with a proven track record of rewarding shareholders, understanding what a Dividend Aristocrat is — and what it actually signals about a business — is essential.

If you're looking for stocks that pay you to hold them, dividend yield is one of the first numbers you need to understand.

It sounds technical. It isn't. And once you know how it works — and what it actually tells you — you'll be a much sharper investor.

Let's break it down.

When it comes to evaluating stocks, most investors are familiar with traditional metrics like the P/E ratio or even the PEG ratio. But if you’re looking for a more complete picture—especially for dividend-paying growth stocks—the PEGY ratiomight be exactly what you need.