How to Read a Stock Quote

Video Transcript

"Hi everyone, this is Chris Markowski, president of Markowski Investments and host of the Watchdog on Wall Street radio show, here to try to tell you how to go about reading a stock quote. Now you see those ticker symbols are going along the bottom of the screen, we got CNBC and it's flying by at a hundred miles an hour with the price right there? Well, you may see that price right there but most don't realize that there are actually two prices to every stock quote. There's a bid and there's an ask. The ask is what you would get at that point in time if you wanted to go out and purchase the stock. That's the ask price. The bid is the price that you would get if you wanted to sell. And obviously there's a discrepancy between the two. The ask is higher always than the bid. Not by much, it's actually come down a lot over the years, but that's basically what it is in regards to a stock quote. You're going to also see a number following some of these stock quotes telling you how good that bid - how long and how many shares that bid is for. And you'll see a number after there, how many thousands of shares or how many hundreds of shares, that bid is good for. That's how you go about reading a stock quote. This is Chris Markowski, your watchdog on Wall Street."