Correct term for describing how “interesting” a stock is to buy
You can call it a stock rating of say between 0 to 5 or 0 to 10 or whatever scale you want to use.  It should not be called a recommendation but rather a rating based on the criterial you have analysed. Also a scale from say 0 to 5 is better than using terms like buy, hold and sell.
Stock is ownership. And whether the thing you own is a good or service irrelevant. The ownership itself is all that matters. Ownership = service ??? Ownership = good ??? Maybe the problem is your trying to fit a verb into a noun-based categories? "Stock support and resistance levels mean that historically, there was ""heavy"" buying/selling at those levels. This suggests, but does not guarantee, that ""someone"" will buy at ""support"" levels, and ""someone"" will sell at ""resistance levels. Any ""history"" is meaningful, but most analysts will say that after six months to a year, the impact of events declines the further back in time you go. They can be meaningful for periods as short as days." I think it may be best to take everything you're asking line-by-line. Once you buy stocks on X day of the month, the chances of stocks never actually going above and beyond your point of value on the chart are close to none. This is not true. Companies can go out of business, or take a major hit and never recover.  Take Volkswagen for example, in 2015 due to a scandal they were involved in, their stocks went downhill. Now their stocks are starting to rise again. The investors goal is not to wait as long as necessary to make a profit on every stock purchase, but to make the largest profit possible in the shortest time possible. Sometimes this means selling a stock before it recovers (if it ever does). I think the problem with most buyers is that they desire the most gain they can possibly have. However, that is very risky. This can be true. Every investor needs to gauge the risk they're willing to take and high-gain investments are riskier.  Therefore, it's better to be winning [small/medium] amounts of money (~)100% of the time than [any] amount of money <~25%. Safer investments do tend to yield more consistent returns, but this doesn't mean that every investor should aim for low-yield investments. Again, this is driven by the investor's risk tolerance. To conclude, profitable companies' stock tends to increase over time and less aggressive investments are safer, but it is possible to lose from any stock investment. How I understand it is: supply/demand affect price of stock   negatively/positively, respectively. Correct. Volume is the amount of buying/selling activity in these stocks (more   volume = more fluctuation, right?). Sort of.  Higher volume means higher liquidity.  That is, a stock that is traded more is easier to trade.  It doesn't necessarily mean more fluctuation and in the real world, it often means that these are well-understood stocks with a high amount of analyst coverage.  This tends towards these stocks not being as volatile as smaller stocks with less liquidity. Company revenue (and profit) will help an investor predict company   growth. That is one factor in a stock price.  There are certain stocks that you would buy without them making a profit because their future revenue looks potentially explosive.  However, these stocks are very risky and are bubble-prone. If you're starting out in the share market, it's generally a good idea to invest in index funds (I am not a broker, my advice should not be taken as financial advice).  These funds aggregate risk by holding a lot of different companies.  Also, statistics have shown that over time, buying and holding index funds long term tends to dramatically outperform other investment strategies, particularly for people with low amounts of capital. Yep, you have it pretty much right.   The volume is the number of shares traded that day. The ticker is giving you the number of shares bought at that price in a given transaction, the arrow meaning whether the stock is up or down on the day at that price.   Institutional can also refer to pensions, mutuals funds, corporates; generally any shareholder that isn't an individual person. "Most likely because they don't know what they're talking about. They all have a belief without evidence that information set X is internalised into the price but information set Y is not. If there is some stock characteristic, call it y, that belongs to set Y, then that moves the gauge towards a ""buy"" recommendation. However, the issue is that no evidence has been used to determine the constituents of X and Y, or even whether Y exists in any non-trivial sense." Volatility is a shitty metric and is sample dependent, What is more interesting is point recurrence, i.e. how many times has a certain point been touched in x time, you can make good day trading strategies off point recurrence (relative that is). Your autograph analogy seems relevant to me. But it is not just speculation. In the long run, investing in stocks is like investing in the economy. In the long run, the economy is expected to grow , hence stock prices are expected to go up. Now in theory: the price of any financial instrument is equal to the net present value today of all the future cash flows from the instrument. So if company's earnings improve, shareholders hope that the earnings will trickle down to them either in form of dividends or in form of capital gain. So they buy the stock, creating demand for it. I can try to explain more if this did not make any sense. :) Do what's outlined here. The capital asset pricing model will reveal how an asset (a stock in this instance) performed relative to the market performance for that time period. This by itself will answer your assignment's question but allowing you to traverse much deeper in the intricate details of the field. You'll learn a few interesting things on the way! Good luck :) "I have my ""safe"" money in index funds but like to dabble in individual stocks. My criteria and thought process are usually like this, let's use SBUX as an example: Understand what the company does. Also paraphrased as ""buy what you know"". A profitable/growing business doesn't need to be complicated. Open stores. Sell coffee. For SBUX, my decision process literally started inside a store: ""Rocky, why are you standing in line to overpay for coffee? Wow, look at all these people! Hmmm. I wonder if this is a good stock to buy?"" Check out their fundamentals. Are they profitable? P.E.ratio, book value, and PEG are helpful, and I tend to use them as a gauge for whether I think the stock is overpriced or not. I compare those values to others in the industry. SBUX right now has a PE of ~30, which looks about average for its peers (PEP, KKD, GMCR). So far so good. Does it pay a dividend? This isn't necessarily good or bad, just useful to know. I like dividend-paying stocks, even if it means the stock price might not grow as aggressively. Also, a company that pays a dividend is naturally confident in its ability to turn a profit and generate cash. So it's a safer pick, in my opinion. SBUX pays a dividend, a small one, but that's a plus for me. Am I willing to watch the stock? With my index funds, I buy and forget. With my stocks, I keep an eye on the situation, read the news, and have to make a buy/sell decision regularly. With SBUX, I don't watch all that closely, I just keep up with the news. IMO, it's still a buy based on all the above criteria. And I feel less silly now standing in line to overpay for coffee." "Investors are ""forever"" comparing the prices of stocks to other stocks. As others have pointed out, this is done faster and more frequently nowadays with high-speed computer programs. There may be no ""fresh"" news on stock A, but if there is fresh news on stock B (as there usually is), the news on B affects the COMPARISON with stock A. That could be what causes trading in stock A that has ""no news.""" popularity that you are referring to is just known as liquidity when discussing markets. More liquid securities tend to trade more shares per day and have very tight bid/ask spreads as many investors are buying and selling the shares at one time.  Some larger securities, especially on exchanges, further enhance liquidity by providing market makers. These are individuals on the NYSE, for example, that will make the market in large securities by handling large orders and providing liquidity through their own book of capital. The individuals on the floor on the NYSE you often see on TV are those market makers. However, as trading becomes more electronic, market markers are becoming less and less required.  A previous comment suggested pink sheets are risky companies. This is not entirely factual. While the majority of pink sheets are very highly risky companies, many very solid international companies trade their ADRs (American Depository Receipt) on the pink sheets to avoid the high cost of setting up a large exchange at the NYSE and register and report through the SEC.  As a TD Ameritrade user, I would be willing to help you out if you have any other questions. id like to start by saying youre still doing this yourself, and i dont actually have all the info required anyway, dont send it but  &gt;[3] Descriptive Statistical Measures: Provide a thorough discussion of the meaning and interpretation of the four descriptive &gt;statistical measures required in your analysis: (1) Arithmetic Mean, (2) Variance, (3) Standard Deviation and (4) Coefficient of &gt;Variation. For example, how are these measures related to each other? In order to develop this discussion, you may want to &gt;consult chapters 2 and 3 of your textbook. This topic is an important part of your report. can be easily interpreted, im guessing the mean is simply just the observed (and then projected stock price for future models) the standard deviation determines the interval in which the stock price fluctuates. so you have like a curve, and then on this curve theirs a bunch of normal distributions modeling the variance of the price plotted against the month  also the coefficient of variation is just r^2 so just read up on that and relate it to the meaning of it to the numbers you have  actually my stats are pretty rusty so make sure you really check into these things  but otherwise the formulas for part 4 is simple too. you can compare means of a certain month using certain equations, but there are different ones for certain situations  you can test for significance by comparing the differences of the means and if its outside of your alpha level then it probably means your company is significantly different from the SP index. (take mu of SP - mu of callaway)  you can also find more info on interpreting the two different coefficients your given if you look up comparing means of linear regression models or something "When people talk about ""the price"" of a stock, they usually mean one of the following: Last price:  The price at which a trade most recently took place.  If someone sold (and someone else bought) shares of XYZ for $20 each, then until another trade occurs, the last price of the stock will be quoted at $20. Bid price: The highest price at which someone is currently offering to buy the stock. Ask price: The lowest price at which someone is currently offering to sell the stock. As you can see, all of these are completely determined by the people buying and selling the stock." When you exercise a put, you get paid the strike price immediately. So you can invest that money and earn some interest, compared to only exercising at expiry. So the benefit to exercising early is that extra interest. The cost is the remaining time value of the option, along with any dividend payments you miss. As @JoeTaxpayer points out, there might be tax considerations that make it better to exercise at one time rather than another. But those would likely be personal to you, so if the option would intrinsically have more value unexercised, in many cases you could sell it on rather than exercise it. The exception might be if it wasn't very liquid and the transaction costs of doing that outweighed the theoretical value.