How to Read Stocks in the Newspaper

Video Transcript

"Are you an investor and wondering how you can find out the price of any stock or bond that you own or are thinking of buying? Well one of the easiest ways is to look in your newspaper. Right here I have a copy of the Wall Street Journal and within the Wall Street Journal, if you go into the money and investing, and within the Journal they break down the stock quotes into different portions designated by exchanges. In this example, these companies trade on the New York Stock Exchange. The first company on the list is Ace Limited and looking left to right, they name the company sometimes abbreviated, then the next item would be the symbol that it trades under which is ACE, A C E, then they have the closing price for yesterday, in this case 49 dollars and 14 cents. And then they tell you whether it went up or down between the two days and it went up 1.94 yesterday from the previous trading day. There is other data that you can read about in the Wall Street Journal that might be of interest. For instance this section talks about companies that have gone up or gone down substantially. The last company on this list right here is Lexmark. You know them, they're the printer and computer company. The symbol it trades under is LXK and here they have a little more data than they have in the base stock quotes. They tell you how many shares traded during the day, what the price was at the beginning, what the difference was during the day, the percentage change and then for the last year, what the highest share price has been and the lowest and the difference. So I hope that helps. The newspapers can provide an awful lot of very valuable material that will help you make investment decisions. Remember most of these also have online versions that have prices that fluctuate during the day that will give you in a more accurate appraisal of what the value of your investments are."