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.