I decided to move this to a separate thread, so I have more space
[size=18pt]Lesson 1: What is Stock?
Many companies sell pieces of their company. These are called “shares”. Anybody can buy these shares. The purpose of stock is to buy at low prices, and sell at higher prices.
For example: Steve buys a share in google for $20 (the actual price is higher). The shares in Google go up to $30 each, and steve sells his share. He gets $30, but he paid $20 for the share initially, so he made $10.
Dave buys a share in Apple for $20 (again, not the real price). BUT, the share price in apple goes down. Dave is an idiot, and sells the share at a lower price than he bought them for, say $10 each. He spent $20, but he gets $10 back. He lost $10.
[size=18pt]Lesson 2: Why do prices change?
Ultimately, pricing falls down to Supply and Demand.
[ul][li]If more people want to buy stock in a company (demand) than sell it (supply), the price goes up[/li]
[li]If less people want to buy stock in a company (demand) than sell it (supply), the price goes down[/li][/ul]
So why do investors (that’s you by the way) prefer different companies for stock? Ultimately, it comes down to what’s happening with the company.
Recently, Volkswagen was affected by a scandal. The cost to rectify this scandal, and the profits lost from it, reduced demand for the stock, whilst many people wanted to sell their shares (we’ll get to that in the next lesson). Because demand was lower than supply, the price fell.
[size=18pt]Lesson 3: Why buy stocks?
People buy stocks for two main reasons:
[ul][li]The share of the profit they receive for having a share[/li]
[li]Profit they can make from selling the share at a higher price[/li][/ul]
If you’re a shareholder (in real life), you’ll receive an amount of the company’s profit, normally a percentage per share you have. Obviously that doesn’t apply for PCB Stocks, so let’s move on to the next reason.
The second reason is fairly simple. The idea is to buy stock in a company when the price is low, and sell it when it’s high. Stock price changes dramatically, many times per second, so it’s a bit tricky.
[size=18pt]Lesson 4: How do I buy stocks?
On PCB, buying stocks is actually quite easy. Firstly, you need to find the symbol for the company. To do this, go to Yahoo Finance, and type the name of the company in. I want to buy a share in Google, so I type “Google” in. The symbol for google is GOOG. We’ll be using that in the example.
To look at the details for the share, type in /sm view GOOG.
To buy a share, type in /sm buy GOOG 1 <— Change that to the number of shares you want to buy.
To sell a share, type in /sm sell GOOG 1 <— Change that to the number of shares you want to sell.
If anyone wants to know something, PM me and I’ll add it.
