Look in your paper in the financial section. Sunday normally has a pretty good listing with the weekly figures on how the stock did the week before. Might want to get a Wall Street Journal or Barons for a full listing with the ticker symbols. Many of the papers will have a section or a box that will explain the entries as on the next page here. Do not be overwhelmed with the large amounts of data and the companies listed in there. You will probably never read it all anyway or use 90% of it all.

Pick out a few companies that you have basic knowledge of. Say Coca-Cola (KO-NYSE), Pepsi (PEP-NYSE), Compaq computers (CPQ-NYSE), Gateway 2000 (GTW-NYSE), Dell (DELL-NASDAQ), Microsoft (MSFT-NASDAQ). Look down the list and just see what you recognize. You might be surprised at what you will find. Most are abbreviated anyhow and have the "ticker symbol" after it. This symbol is what you really need to get to know. I included the exchange after the ticker symbol in these to look at to get you looking at the various markets. Each stock will have a different symbol.

Companies will offer stock to the public very simply as a way of borrowing money for their various needs. This money is then put to work by financing projects like more inventory, research and development, building new plants, global expansion etc.

Investors will buy the stock in hopes of a return on their investment. This will happen several ways. The stock will increase in value by the price going up which is called capital gains. Most of the larger companies will take a portion of the profits and pay it back to the investor in a form of a dividend. These dividends are normally paid quarterly to shareholders on record at a given date.

The company will keep their own supply of stock internally with in their treasuries. This is mainly used to pay out for a bonus to certain employees and for their drip programs discussed later. A company can take some of their excess cash and buy back the stock from the public reducing their debt load and possibly increasing their share price because of the lower amount of shares outstanding. At times, the company will have to issue more shares due to not having enough in their treasury to cover a stock split. A stock split will occur when the price of the shares gets high enough to were a company will split normally 2 for 1 to bring the price back down to realistic limits.

Now let’s figure out what all these numbers mean!

*1 Stock: Company Abbreviation or Symbol.

*2 Stock Footnote: s-Split or dividend, Many other different abbreviations.

*3 Dividend: Yearly Amount!

*4 PE Ratio: Price to earnings ratio.

*5 Sales in hundreds of shares.

*6 52 Week High Price.

*7 52 Week Low Price.

*8 Last transaction or selling price of the stock.

*9 Net Change between the last transaction and the previous session’s close.

There are other footnotes, worry about them later!

Most business sections will have this listed somewhere for you to refer to so don’t worry about remembering it all.

Pick out 6 stocks that you might be interested in. Follow them for a couple of weeks. Keep a log of the date, time and price, this will help you make your buying decision. Is the stock continuing to grow at a steady rate, jump at unusual rates, find out why. Does the stock loose? This is not a bad sign because you want to buy at the lowest price possible. But wait for it to start rising again. Buy low, sell high. Take the time to watch them and to get a feel for the specific stocks.

Take a look at the yearly prices. Find a stock that is in between the high and low. Most of the companies with a high dividend rate will not fluctuate much. Look for company with a good growth rate. A low price can be a risky investment although a greater amount of return for a short-term gain, company could be in trouble. Stay leery of the stock being at the high price and it really depends upon the situation the company is in. So let’s for now look for a company that is somewhere in between.

The dividend rate is very important for long term investing. Most companies pay dividends quarterly, but keep in mind that they are listed at the yearly rate. At the $1.20 rate, You will receive 30 cents a share every quarter. This will be discussed in length later.