As personal finance experts, you and I shouldn’t be concerned with singular stocks. We shouldn’t be paying attention to the day to day movements of the market, much less a particular company. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t understand everything you might see on a web page for a stock. This isn’t a College of Weakonomics lesson, but if you’re very new to this I suggest you read my introductory courses on stocks, Weakon 135 and 235.
So the first thing you need to do when you want to look up a stock is to pick a company. I’m partial to financial companies and prefer to use them for my examples. Today We’re going to do Morgan Stanley. In order to look up the stock you need to know where to go. For some of us this isn’t difficult, but for others it can be. My two favorite sites are Yahoo Finance and Google Finance. We’ll be going to both. Either site can help you find out what the ticker symbol for the company is just by putting it in the search bar. Morgan Stanley is MS.
Before we start, it’s probably best to do this with a window open on the stock and a window on this post.
So let’s look at the Yahoo Finance page for Morgan Stanley first because it’s cleaner than Google’s page. In the middle of the page you’ll see the company name and in parenthesis the letters NYSE. This is the New-York Stock Exchange and it’s where MS stock is traded. Below that you’ll see a number that says “last trade.” This is the price of Morgan Stanley stock at the time you pulled up the page. When I did this the evening of October 7, the price was $31.16. That is how much one share of stock in Morgan Stanley is worth. It’s far and above the most important number, but you’re here to learn the other items.
Below the price is the trade time, which was the time the trade was executed at the price listed. Below that is the change which is the dollar increase or decrease (% in parenthesis) of the new price over/under the closing price of the shares from the day before. You can verify this because the next item below it is the previous close, which is the price Morgan Stanley closed at the day before. The open price is the first recorded price Morgan Stanley stock sold for in the current trading day. Bid and Ask are published numbers of the price people are willing to buy for and price people are willing to sell for, respectively. The 1y Target Est should basically be ignored, as it is not really a target price.
The next column has more interesting information that an investor may use as a part of making investment decisions. Some of them are self-explanatory. The day’s range is the range the stock has traded during the last trading day. The 52 week range is the same thing only for the last year. The volume is the total number of shares that exchanged hands over the course of the day. The average volume is average traded over the last 3 months. Now, the market cap is the market capitalization. If you took all the shares outstanding and multiplied them by the share price it would equal the market cap of the company. This is basically the total value of the company. Morgan Stanley is currently at $42.32 billion. As the share price changes, so does the value of the company. The P/E is the price to earnings ratio. It’s a common tool for comparing two stocks because it states the price of the stock in relation to its earnings, or profit. The EPS is another measurement, that is the earnings per share. That is the total profit divided by the number of shares outstanding. The final item of interest is the div & yield which is the dividend payment in dollars and the yield that the payment is making compared to the price of the share.
That’s it for Yahoo Finance, but there are a couple more things I want you to see on Google Finance. Google Finance displaces the information differently, but it’s mostly the same. The new things are shares, beta, and inst. own. Shares is the total number of shares outstanding for the company. Morgan Stanley currently has 1.36 billion share issues. Multiply that by the stock price and you get the market cap. Institutional ownership is the percentage of shares in the company that are owned by institutional investors (which are big buyers of share compared to small fries). Finally the beta. What is the beta? Beta needs its own post, so come back tomorrow.
Photo: lastnychero
 By The Weakonomist |
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