HOW TO READ A STOCK TABLE.The stock pages in the newspaper may look like secret code. But you can learn a lot about stocks once you know how to read them. Here's an example using the listing for Yahoo Inc., the Internet Internet Publicly accessible computer network connecting many smaller networks from around the world. It grew out of a U.S. Defense Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969 with connections between computers at the portal, which is sold on the exchange. The listing is adapted from The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times of February February: see month. 15, 2001, and reflects trading on the previous day. The highest and lowest prices paid for a share of stock in the past year in dollars. These figures can show you whether today's price is high or low for this stock. The difference between high and low also tells how volatile, or unstable unstable, adj 1. not firm or fixed in one place; likely to move. 2. capable of undergoing spontaneous change. A nuclide in an unstable state is called radioactive. An atom in an unstable state is called excited. , a stock is. Percent yield--the dividend divided by the stock's closing price--is one way of evaluating a stock's worth. It tells how much a stock pays compared with how much it costs. Because Yahoo pays no dividend, this column is left blank. High, low, and close (sometimes called last) are the highest and lowest prices at which the stock sold during the day, and its final price when the market closed. (Prices are sometimes reported in fractions of dollars--6 1/4 means $6.25.) The change--the difference between a stock's closing price that day and its closing price the clay before--shows whether the price is going up or down. A minus sign means the price went down; a plus sign means it went up. Each company is given a unique abbreviation abbreviation, in writing, arbitrary shortening of a word, usually by cutting off letters from the end, as in U.S. and Gen. (General). Contraction serves the same purpose but is understood strictly to be the shortening of a word by cutting out letters in the middle, to avoid confusion. In Yahoo's case, it's it's 1. Contraction of it is. 2. Contraction of it has. See Usage Note at its. it's it is or it has it's be ~have simply the company's name. The company's trading symbol Trading symbol See: Ticker symbol , up to four letters. A dividend is the amount of company profits a shareholder can expect to receive for each share of stock over the course of a year. A blank here indicates that Yahoo doesn't pay dividends. People who buy stocks that don't pay dividends are hoping to make money by selling the stock when its price increases. The price-earnings ratio Price-earnings ratio Shows the multiple of earnings at which a stock sells. Determined by dividing current stock price by current earnings per share (adjusted for stock splits). (PE), another way of evaluating a stock, shows the relation between a stock's price and the company's earnings. It is the closing price divided by the company's earnings per share. Yahoo's PE is high, like that of many Internet companies, and means the stock price is 237.5 times higher than per share earnings. The total number of shares traded for the day in hundreds. To get the number of shares traded, add two zeros to the number (unless the number is preceded by the letter "z," in which case it is the actual number). Therefore, on February 14, 10,973,700 shares of Yahoo changed hands. An unusually large volume often means investors are reacting to news about the company or about other events that could I affect the company's performance. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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