Reading Stock

What's stock? And no, it's not cattle! Stock is a unit of ownership of a company that lets the owner share in the company's earnings and assets. If you've seen the business section of the newspaper, you know it lists stocks and a bunch of numbers. Have you ever wondered what all those letters and numbers mean?

Tickers Symbols: Ticker symbols are short abbreviations of the companies in the stock market. See if you can match the following ticker symbols with their company. If you're not sure, you can find the company's abbreviated ticker symbol here.

General Electric CoGE
AOL Time WarnerAOL
Coca Cola Co.KO
Intel CorpINTC
Papa John'sPZZA
Pepsi CoPEP
Microsoft Corp.MSFT
Tricon Global RestaurantsYUM


Choose a company or companies to investigate such as: Campbell Soups, Disney, McDonalds, The Limited Inc., etc. Look up the stock online or your local newspaper.

Next to each company you see some numbers. Can you guess what those numbers are? Can you find anywhere on the page that tells you what the abbreviation means? On quicken.com, you can click on the abbreviation and a definition window will pop up.
  1. P/E: This is the price-earning ratio. It tells how much investors are willing to pay for $1 of the company's earnings. P/E is found by dividing the price of a share of stock and by the earnings per share. When deciding which stock to buy, look for one with a P/E ratio lower than others in its industry.
  2. Last or Prev Close: Last or Previous Closing price tells you the last prices calculated the day before at 4:30 p.m. Eastern time the previous day.
  3. Chg: Chg is the change in price for the day. What does a + or - mean?
  4. Dvd: Dvd is the dividend. This is the portion of the company's profits many companies pay out to the shareholders for each share they own. If a column has three dots or is left blank, the company doesn't pay cash out. This is not necessarily bad. It could mean that the company is investing in itself. As a long term investor you are interested in the growth of the value of a share not the dividend.
  5. Yld or Div Yield: Yld is the yield. The percent yield is how much dividend you get for what you would pay for a share of stock today. Again, for long-term investors what a company pays out in a year is not important.
The Wall Street Journal and some investment websites will have additional information for research and planning.
  1. 52-Week Range or 52-Week Hi (Low): This is simply the range or highest (lowest) value the stock reached in the last 52 weeks.
  2. Sales 100: This number times 100 is the number of shares traded the previous day.