Stock Quotes

Stock quotes are regularly updated at financial news channels, websites. Their purpose is to provide regular updates to the investors so that they know how the stocks are performing.

Most of us have seen stock quotes on newspapers, television or internet. It may seem gibberish at first but reading stock quotes is not difficult. All the newspapers have a business section which carries all the stock market information daily. If one does not know how to read those figures and quotes, then there is no way of knowing how your stock is performing. One can miss out on very useful information if one does not know how to read stock figures. Anybody who is new to stock market and want to learn about stocks should first learn how to read a stock quote.

Al the quotes have a company name listed at first. The name is in the abbreviated form, followed by the stock symbol. The ticker symbol or the stock symbol is used by various stock exchanges to identify the company.

Prices of the stocks are the most important information and the quotes have a number of prices listed. Almost all quotes contain two very important figures, which are 52 week high and the 52 week low figures. The 52 week high or ‘Hi’ is the highest price of the stock that was traded in the last one year. Similarly, 52 week low or ‘Low’ is the lowest price the stock was traded at in past one year. The Close is the closing price or the price at which last stock was traded that day. Similarly, there is also an opening price.

The PE is price to earnings ratio, a very useful indicator for investors. The PE ratio is calculated by dividing the price of stock by earnings per share of the company. Typically, PE ratio is at 15. A higher PE ratio can mean that stock is over valued and lower PE ratio can mean that the stock is undervalued. It is a way to make comparisons about stocks.

There are Dividend (Div) and Yield (Yld) figures also. The dividend refers to the cash that all the stockholders receive yearly based on the company’s profits. The yield figure is obtained by dividing cash dividend and the closing price of the stock.

There is another column which carries the Volume of shares traded on the previous business day. There are intra day high and intra day Low prices also which shows the highest and lowest stock prices on that day.

There are many ways of sourcing Stock quotes these days. Earlier, only newspapers carried the stock quotes so an investor could only see about the changes in the stock market the next day in newspapers. On internet one can see all the changes in stock prices and figures in real time, during trading hours.

Most of the quotes displayed on websites are near- real time, which means they are delayed by 15-20 minutes. Genuine real time stock quotes come at a premium and many paid web sites offer real time stock quotes.

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