Share Market

A potential buyer for a stock quotes a certain highest price and the seller quotes his lowest price he is ready to offer. This defines a normal bid-ask spread. However the stock quote is entirely different from this. It refers to the prices themselves rather than being the difference itself.

Reading a stock quote is more like reading the magic codes because even when one has extremely good knowledge about numbers associated with trading a stock, it is tough. Making use of them is even tougher. The seasoned traders also have to stop and think before they have analyzed the quotes. In fact de-coding the stock’s future direction is very hard to find.

The Stock quotes follow a similar format whether you use the new age Yahoo Finance or the old school procedure. Right at the top of the quote is the name of the company being traded as well as the stock’s ticker symbol. There are quite a few stock exchanges that a stock could be traded on. For example, major cities like Tokyo and London have their own exchanges like other countries, that is, Australia and Switzerland. Internet has a base of a list of the major stock exchanges, along with in-depth information about each one. The numbers that make up a stock quote are divided into two columns where the left-hand column focuses more on the basic facts while the right hand side reflects a little more analysis on the stock in talk.

Discussing further on the bid-ask section, when you see both the bid and ask sections of a stock quote, they are either blank or are listed as N/A. Now, a bid is the highest price that a principle brokerage firm has announced it’s willing to pay for a share of a specific stock at a specific time.

There is also a Day’s range which can be seen at the starting, on the right-hand side of the stock quote. Rather than relying on a single share to give an idea of what a stock is doing at that time, it in fact gives you the range on which a stock’s price has varied by over the course of the day.