Stock Market Reporting
by MaestriUp until a couple of years ago, the best source of stock quotations was the business section of a daily newspaper, such as The Wall Street Journal. One problem with newspapers, however, is that they are only printed once a day. Now it is possible to get quotes all during the day from a wide variety of Internet sources.19 One of the best is Yahoo!, and Figure 5-8 shows a detailed quote for Abbott Labs. As the first row of the quote shows, Abbott Labs is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol ABT. The first row also provides links to additional information. The second row starts with the price of the last trade. For Abbott Labs, this was 4:03 P.M. on October 31, 2001, at a price of $52.98. Note that the price is reported in decimals rather than fractions, reflecting a recent change in trading conventions. The second row also reports the closing price from the previous day ($53.78) and the change from the previous
closing price to the current price. For Abbott Labs, the price fell by $0.80, which was a 1.49 percent decline. The trading volume during the day was 3,478,100 shares of stock. In other words, almost 3.5 million shares of Abbott Labs’ stock changed hands. Immediately below the daily volume is the average daily volume for the past three months. For Abbott Labs, this was 3.1 million shares, which means that trading on October 31 was a little heavier than usual.
The last item in the second row shows that Abbott Labs is scheduled to pay a dividend on November 15. As shown on the last row, the annual dividend is $0.84 per share, so the quarterly dividend payment will be $0.21 per share. The third row shows an ex-dividend date of October 11, meaning that the owner of the stock as of October 10 will receive the dividend, no matter who owns the stock on November 15. In other words, the stock trades without the dividend as of October 11. The last row also reports a div idend yield of 1.56 percent, which is the dividend divided by the stock price.
The third row reports the range of prices for the day and the first trade of the day, called the open price. Thus, Abbott Labs opened the day at $53.50, traded as low as $52.98 and as high as $53.99, and finally closed at $52.98, its low for the day. If Abbott Labs had been listed on Nasdaq, the most recent bid and ask quotes from dealers would have been shown. Because Abbott Labs trades on the NYSE, this data is not available.
The bottom row shows the price range of Abbott Labs’ stock during the past year, which was from $42.00 to $56.25. The chart to the right shows the daily prices for the past year, and the links below the chart allow a web user to pick different intervals for data in the chart. The bottom row also reports the earnings per share, based on the earnings in the past 12 months. The ratio of the price per share to the earnings per share, the P/E ratio, is shown on the bottom row. For Abbott Labs, this is 49.80. The total market value of all its stock is called Mkt Cap, and it is $82.195 billion.
Taken From : Five-Minute MBA – Corporate Finance
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