Science,
Industry and Business Library
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Evaluating
Companies
Evaluating Stock Performance
Understanding Stock Information
Using Analysts' Reports
Assessment
Evaluating
Stock Performance
As you'll remember from previous modules, only publicly held companies
trade on the stock
exchange, so the following information will not apply if you are
researching a privately held company.
How can I find out how a company is performing on the stock exchange?
The one piece of information you must have to find out how a company
is doing in the stock market is that company's ticker symbol. A
tick is the minimum movement in the price of a company's stock.
A ticker symbol is the code assigned to publicly held companies
trading on a stock
exchange. For instance, Microsoft's ticker symbol is MSFT.
There are various ways to find a company's ticker symbol. In databases
that use the ticker symbol as the primary search option, such as
Factiva, a list of ticker symbols is provided. Ticker symbols
can also be located via Yahoo!Finance and other websites.
Once you know a company's ticker symbol, you can use it to track
its stock performance in the business pages of newspapers, on such
television channels as CNBC, which runs stock prices arranged
by ticker symbol, and on a multitude of websites, such as Yahoo!
Finance. You can also search for more sites offering stock quotes
at Google. For the Web addresses of these sites, visit the
Resources section of this course.
The Internet provides obvious advantages for tracking a stock's
highs and lows in terms of immediacy and accessibility. If you have
a computer and a modem, you can find stock quotes any time, day
or night.
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