Share
A share is one unit of ownership in a company, so owning a share makes you a part-owner of the business.
If a company has divided itself into a billion shares and you own one, you own a billionth of it — a billionth of its profits, its buildings, its debts and its future. That is the whole idea, and everything else about the stock market is machinery around it.
"Shares" and "stock" get used interchangeably. Stock is the general thing you own, shares are the countable units of it: you own stock in Apple, and specifically you own three shares.
A share price rises and falls because people disagree about what the company will earn in future. It is not set by the company, and it is not a measure of how good the company is today.
In Stoxhatch
You buy whole shares with simulated cash. Your position is the number of shares you hold and what you paid for them.
Related
- Ticker — A ticker is the short code that identifies a company on the stock market, like AAPL for Apple.
- Position — A position is what you currently own in one company: how many shares, and what you paid for them.
- Market capitalisation — Market cap is the share price multiplied by the number of shares — what the market thinks the whole company is worth.
Try it with $10,000 of simulated cash, no signup needed — or browse the rest of the glossary.