Buying Shares – Chapter 13: How to Read Quotes of Shares

This is chapter number 13 out of 19. Read the rest:

Read Buying Shares – Everything that you Wanted to Know but were too Scared to Ask – Chapter 1: Introduction
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 2: What are Stocks and Shares?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 3: Different Classes of Stocks
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 4: What affects ‘Stock Prices’?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 5: Stock Markets
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 6: Stock Exchanges, Why are companies listing on a stock exchange today?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 7: Stock Indexes – What do they stand for?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 8: How do I Trade Shares?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 9: What kind of a Trader are you?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 10: Investing Methodology: Planning Trades and Picking Stocks
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 11: Placing an order – The technicalities involved, Step 1 – Open a Share Dealing
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 12: Step 2 – Research the Stocks

Step 1:

Find the shortened name of the company. In this case it’s GOOG which is short for Google.

Step 2:

Look at the 52-week (approximately yearly) high (“Hi”). This is the maximum price anybody has paid for the stock in the past year.

Step 3:

Find the 52-week (approximately yearly) low (“Low”). This is the lowest price paid for the stock in the previous year.

Step 4:

Make a note of the ticker symbol. This symbol is used by the stock exchange to identify the company. In this case it’s GOOG.

Step 5:

You can see today’s activity in the second column here. Today’s open price, high price, low price and the prev. close which would have been from the last trading days activity. Change shows percentage of change since markets close the last trading day and the current price.

Step 6:

The column entitled “most recent activity” looks at the last trade for Google shares, so we can see that at 4.28pm, 1900 Google shares were traded at a price of 425.32 per share, Volume is the total amount of Google shares that were traded in the last day’s trading.

The figure above gives even more detail including P/E price-earnings ratio which is worked out by dividing the closing price by earnings for the past four quarters. This provides a way to compare stock values.

Now look at the Div & Yield line in the second column. “Div” is the amount of cash that would be paid to shareholders yearly based on the most recent quarterly payment. “Yield” is the cash dividend divided by the closing price of the stock. In this quote this figure is currently unavailable as this guide was written when the markets were closed.

Read Buying Shares – Chapter 14: Buying and selling shares- how’s it done?
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 15: Buying Shares – The Rules
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 16: Tips for Stock Market Investing
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 17: The Difference between Stocks and Shares
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 18: Q & A session
Read Buying Shares – Chapter 19: Glossary words to learn