If you’re someone who has never paid attention to stocks investment before but are now toying with the idea of dabbling in the stock market, one of the things you will have to learn is how to read the stocks investment tables that you see in the business section of your newspaper.

Right now all those numbers seem to be Greek language to you perhaps, but if you know what each one stands for and how these numbers relate to each other, it will become easy to understand.

The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, and the business section of most dailies show charts and tables from different major stock exchanges such as the NYSE, the Nasdaq, and AMEX. Information about penny stocks is found in the Russell 2000, and S&P 600 stock tables. Understanding stocks investment tables is helpful if you are looking for a worthwhile stocks investment opportunity, or if you want to track the stocks that you have bought.

52 week high - This is the highest price that the stock has reached in the last 52 weeks. This price will give you an idea of where the stock is now in reference to its performance in the past.

52-week low: This is the lowest price that the stock has reached in the last 52 weeks. This is information is helpful in analyzing the stocks performance over a period of time.

Div: A div, or dividend, is a payment made by the company to the stockholder. If the company pays a dividend, it will show in this column. The price you will see here is the annual dividend per share of stock.

Yld: This means Yield, and refers to the percentage of the dividend over the stock price. If a company did not give any dividends, the value would be zero.

P/E: This is the ratio between the price of the stock and the company’s earnings. The figure is reported as per single share of stock. The P/E ratio is also called earnings multiple or multiple, and is used to determine whether a stock is expensive and therefore a good stocks investment. For large cap stocks, a P/E of 10 to 20 is ideal, and for growth or small caps stocks, this should be 30 to 40, not more.

The P/E ratio is one of the most important figures on the stock table because it will tell you whether your smart caps stock is a good buy or not. If you notice that a company has no P/E ratio, this means that the company reported a loss in the last year and would probably not be a good stocks investment.

Vol: This refers to the trading volume of the stock, meaning the total number of stocks of the company that were bought and sold for the day. What you would have to watch out for is a highly active activity - positive or negative - for that stock. If the trading volume has an excessive difference from that stocks normal range, then something must be going on.

It may be that the company has just entered into a new deal with another company or introduced a new product, or it may experiencing financial problems.

High/Low: The high and low figures indicate the highest and lowest price at which the stock was bought and sold for a particular day.

Day Last: This figure tells you the price at which the stock ended during the trading for the day.

Chg: This number refers to the Net Change between the stocks performance at the end of today, compared with the end of the previous day.

There are many more figures and codes to a stock table, but these are the most common. Some stock exchanges and electronic quotation systems will show more figures than others. If you can begin to understand these figures, after a while you will find yourself getting out that paper, pen and calculator to do work out your own computations and estimates.

Nir Dotan is a writer and promoter of
Stocks Investment
services, and
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