Get Your Stock Market Basics Crisp And Clear

As an investor or a trader, you should know about some stock market fundamentals. For instance, an index is a benchmark which is used as a reference marker for traders and portfolio managers. A 10% may sound good, but if the market index returned 12%, then you didn’t do very well since you could have just invested in an index fund and saved time by not trading frequently. Examples are the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Standard & Poor’s 500. Similarly, you have to put an order in to buy or sell 100 shares of stock. And order is nothing but an investor’s bid to buy or sell a certain amount of stock or option contracts. Your portfolio would mean a collection of investments owned by you as an investor. You can have as little as one stock in a portfolio to an infinite amount of stocks. When you get a quote, this means information on a stock’s latest trading price. This is sometimes delayed by 20 minutes unless you are using an actual broker trading platform. Rally is a rapid increase in the general price level of the market or of the price of a stock. A group of stocks that are in the same business is called sector. An example would be the “Technology” sector including companies like Apple and Microsoft. Spread is the difference between the bid and the ask prices of a stock, or the amount someone is willing to buy it and someone is willing to sell it. Stock symbol is a one character to three characters, alphabetic root symbol, which represents a publically traded company on a stock exchange. Apple’s stock symbol is AAPL. Volatility refers to the price movements of a stock or the stock market as a whole. Highly volatile stocks are ones with extreme daily up and down movements and wide intraday trading ranges. This is often common with stocks that are thinly traded, or have low trading volumes. Volume is the number of shares of stock traded during a particular time period, normally measured in average daily trading volume. Yield usually refers to the measure of the return on an investment that is received from the payment of a dividend. This is determined by dividing the annual dividend amount by the price paid for the stock.

If you are still wondering what I am talking about, you can get all such terms clarified with the best broker of your town and then start trading with the help of your top broking firm or top broker.

It Is Important For All Stock Brokers To Stay Competitive In This Era Of Customer Service

For the full service brokerage firms, logical target customers include planning-based investors who are attracted to packaged products, as well as those who are more oriented toward individual stocks. A further subset of planning-based investors, people who invest in no-load mutual funds, also should be considered a viable and valuable customer group.To appeal to these investor groups, full service firms have aggressively started marketing the value they can add as a total service provider. Understanding a client's goals and risk tolerance, developing investment strategies consistent with those goals and measuring performance against the goals is critical to delivering on the full service promise. In addition, the value of personalized service and individual attention, the convenience of bundling products together and the availability of research material are strengths and capabilities that are being actively promoted.Enhancing product breadth, including offerings in the no-load mutual fund category and goal oriented programs, is also critical. Most importantly, full service firms have started proactively managing client relationships to ensure that the value of their complete range of capabilities is being utilized and appreciated. These firms are establishing and delivering high service standards, and also initiating loyalty programs to help retain key customers.On-going cost management is imperative, too, as customers have become increasingly aware of the more cost effective alternatives. Thus, full service firms are faced with the challenge of reducing costs while enhancing operating efficiencies. They pass these improved economics on to customers in the form of lower commissions or discounted fees in order to reduce the visible price disadvantage with specialized providers. It is so good to see the service standards of stock brokers coming up to this extent and all this is because of the fierce competition that is happening amongst top broking firms because of the influx of discount brokers and online stock brokers.

Superior service is now a basic requirement for all brokerage firms. Customers expect access to investment and account information 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, across a variety of channels. The stock brokerage firms have enhanced their direct channels to offer these service levels. In addition, customer expectations continue to become more demanding regarding transaction execution cycle times and the time it takes to resolve problems, as well as the rate at which those problems occur.In conclusion, all types of stock brokerage firms are aggressively focusing and managing their business to remain competitive in the coming years.