Can I buy stocks directly from a public company?
"As far as I know, the answer to this is generally ""no.""  The closest thing would be to identify the stock transfer company representing the company that you want to hold and buy through them. (I have held this way, but I don't know if it's available on all stocks.)  This eliminates the broker, but there's still a ""middle man"" in the transfer company. Note this section from the Stock transfer agent Wikipedia article: A public company usually only designates one company to transfer its stock. Stock transfer agents also run annual meetings as inspector of elections, proxy voting, and special meetings of shareholders. They are considered the official keeper of the corporate shareholder records. The decision to have a single transfer company is a practical one, ensuring that there is one entity responsible for recording this data - Hence even if you could buy stock ""directly"" from the company that you want to own, it would likely still get routed through the transfer company for recording." This is allowed somewhat infrequently.  You can often purchase stocks through DRIPs which might have little or no commission.  For example Duke Energy (DUK) runs their plan internally, so you are buying from them directly.  There is no setup fee, or reinvestment fee.  There is a fee to sell. Other companies might have someone else manage the DRIP but might subsidize some transaction costs giving you low cost to invest.  Often DRIPs charge relatively large amounts to sell and they are not very nimble if trading is what you are after. You can also go to work for a company, and often they allow you to buy stock from them at a discount (around 15% discount is common). You can use a discount broker as well.  TradeKing, which is not the lowest cost broker, allows buys and sells at 4.95 per trade.  If trading 100 shares that is similar in cost to the DUK DRIP. Yes, you often can buy stocks directly from the company at little or no transaction cost.  Many companies have either a Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRIP) or a Direct Stock Plan (DSP).  With these plans, you purchase shares directly from the company (although, often there is a third party transfer agent that handles the transaction), and the stock is issued in your name.  This differs from purchasing stock from a broker, where the stock normally remains in the name of the broker. Generally, in order to begin participating in a DRIP, you need to already be a registered stockholder.  This means that you need to purchase your first share of stock outside of the DRIP, and get it in your name.  After that, you can register with the DRIP and purchase additional shares directly from the company.  If the company has a DSP, you can begin purchasing shares directly without first being a stockholder. With the advent of discount brokers, DRIPs do not save as much money for regular investors as they once did.  However, they can still sometimes save money for someone who wants to purchase shares on a regular basis over even a discount broker. If you are interested in DRIPs and DSPs and want to learn more, there is an informative website at dripinvesting.org that has lots of information on which DRIPs are available and how to get started. If the company has a direct reinvestment plan or DRIP that they operate in house or contract out to a financial company to administer, yes. There can still be transaction fees, and none of these I know of offer real time trading.  Your trade price will typically be defined in the plan as the opening or closing price on the trade date.  Sometimes these plans offer odd lot sales at a recent running average price which could provide a hundred dollar or so arbitrage opportunity.
The S&P is cap-weighted. So it's not as simple as buying 1 share of each of 500 stocks. (If it were, getting started might be doable, although adding to your position would take time and another large unit of money.) Can you do it? Sure? Do you have enough money to actually do it? I don't know. I'm happy to pay my .02-.03% to not worry about such things. Yes, that is correct. There is no limit.  An initial public offering of common stock by a company means that these shares remain outstanding for as long as the company wishes. The exceptions are through corporate actions, most commonly either "I can see two possibilities. Either a deal is struck that someone (the company itself, or a large owner) buys out the remaining shares. This is the scenario @mbhunter is talking about, so I won't go too deeply into it, but it simply means that you get money in your bank account for the shares in question the same as if you were to sell them for that price (in turn possibly triggering tax effects, etc.). I imagine that this is by far the most common approach. The other possibility is that the stock is simply de-listed from a public stock exchange, and not re-listed elsewhere. In this case, you will still have the stock, and it will represent the same thing (a portion of the company), but you will lose out on most of the ""market"" part of ""stock market"". That is, the shares will still represent a monetary value, you will have the same right to a portion of the company's profits as you do now, etc., but you will not have the benefit of the market setting a price per share so current valuation will be harder. Should you wish to buy or sell stock, you will have to find someone yourself who is interested in striking a deal with you at a price point that you feel comfortable with." It depends a large part on your broker's relationship with the issuing bank how early you can participate in the IPO round. But the nature of the stock market means the hotter the stock and the closer to the market (away from the issuing bank) you have to buy the higher the price you'll pay. The stock market is a secondary market, meaning the only things for sale are shares already owned by someone. As a result, for a hot stock the individual investor will have to wait for another investor (not the issuing bank) to trade (sell) the stock. A purchase of a stock is not a taxable event. No 1099 to worry about.  Welcome to Money.SE "The answer is partly and sometimes, but you cannot know when or how. Most clearly, you do not take somebody else's money if you buy shares in a start-up company. You are putting your money at risk in exchange for a share in the rewards. Later, if the company thrives, you can sell your shares for whatever somebody else will pay for your current share in the thriving company's earnings. Or, you lose your money, when the company fails. (Much of it has then ended up in the company's employees' pockets, much of the rest with the government as taxes that the company paid).  If the stockmarket did not exist, people would be far less willing to put their money into a new company, because selling shares would be far harder. This in turn would mean that fewer new things were tried out, and less progress would be made. Communists insist that central state planning would make better decisions than random people linked by a market. I suggest that the historical record proves otherwise. Historically, limited liability companies came first, then dividing them up into larger numbers of ""bearer"" shares, and finally creating markets where such shares were traded.  On the other hand if you trade in the short or medium term, you are betting that your opinion that XYZ shares are undervalued against other investors who think otherwise. But there again, you may be buying from a person who has some other reason for selling. Maybe he just needs some cash for a new car or his child's marriage, and will buy back into XYZ once he has earned some more money.  You can't tell who you are buying from, and the seller can only tell if his decision to sell was good with the benefit of a good few years of hindsight.  I bought shares hand over fist immediately after the Brexit vote. I was putting my money where my vote went, and I've now made a decent profit. I don't feel that I harmed the people who sold out in expectation of the UK economy cratering. They got the peace of mind of cash (which they might then reinvest in Euro stocks or gold or whatever). Time will tell whether my selling out of these purchases more recently was a good decision (short term, not my best, but a profit is a profit ...)  I never trade using borrowed money and I'm not sure whether city institutions should be allowed to do so (or more reasonably, to what extent this should be allowed). In a certain size and shortness of holding time, they cease to contribute to an orderly market and become a destabilizing force. This showed up in the financial crisis when certain banks were ""too big to fail"" and had to be bailed out at the taxpayer's expense. ""Heads we win, tails you lose"", rather than trading with us small guys as equals! Likewise it's hard to see any justification for high-frequency trading, where stocks are held for mere milliseconds, and the speed of light between the trader's and the market's computers is significant." I assume you are talking about a publicly traded company listed on a major stock exchange and the buyer resides in the US. (Private companies and non-US locations can change the rules really a lot.) The short answer is no, because the company does not own the stock, various investors do. Each investor has to make an individual decision to sell or not sell. But there are complications. If an entity buys more than about 10% of the company they have to file a declaration with the SEC. The limit can be higher if they file an assertion that they are buying it solely for investment and are not seeking control of the company. If they are seeking control of the company then more paperwork must be filed and if they want to buy the whole company they may be required to make a tender offer where they offer to buy any and all shares at a specific price. If the company being bought is a financial institution, then the buyer may have to declare as a bank holding company and more regulations apply. The company can advise shareholders not to take the tender offer, but they cannot forbid it. So the short answer is, below 10% and for investment purposes only, it is cash and carry: Whoever has the cash gets to carry the stock away. Above that various regulations and declarations apply, but the company still does not have the power prevent the purchase in most circumstances. In order to see whether you can buy or sell some given quantity of a stock at the current bid price, you need a counterparty (a buyer) who is willing to buy the number of stocks you are wishing to offload. To see whether such a counterparty exists, you can look at the stock's order book, or level two feed. The order book shows all the people who have placed buy or sell orders, the price they are willing to pay, and the quantity they demand at that price. Here is the order book from earlier this morning for the British pharmaceutical company, GlaxoSmithKline PLC.  Let's start by looking at the left-hand blue part of the book, beneath the yellow strip. This is called the Buy side. The book is sorted with the highest price at the top, because this is the best price that a seller can presently obtain. If several buyers bid at the same price, then the oldest entry on the book takes precedence. You can see we have five buyers each willing to pay 1543.0 p (that's 1543 British pence, or £15.43) per share. Therefore the current bid price for this instrument is 1543.0. The first buyer wants 175 shares, the next, 300, and so on. The total volume that is demanded at 1543.0p is 2435 shares. This information is summarized on the yellow strip: 5 buyers, total volume of 2435, at 1543.0. These are all buyers who want to buy right now and the exchange will make the trade happen immediately if you put in a sell order for 1543.0 p or less. If you want to sell 2435 shares or fewer, you are good to go. The important thing to note is that once you sell these bidders a total of 2435 shares, then their orders are fulfilled and they will be removed from the order book. At this point, the next bidder is promoted up the book; but his price is 1542.5, 0.5 p lower than before. Absent any further changes to the order book, the bid price will decrease to 1542.5 p. This makes sense because you are selling a lot of shares so you'd expect the market price to be depressed. This information will be disseminated to the level one feed and the level one graph of the stock price will be updated. Thus if you have more than 2435 shares to sell, you cannot expect to execute your order at the bid price in one go. Of course, the more shares you are trying to get rid of, the further down the buy side you will have to go. In reality for a highly liquid stock as this, the order book receives many amendments per second and it is unlikely that your trade would make much difference. On the right hand side of the display you can see the recent trades: these are the times the trades were done (or notified to the exchange), the price of the trade, the volume and the trade type (AT means automatic trade).  GlaxoSmithKline is a highly liquid stock with many willing buyers and sellers. But some stocks are less liquid. In order to enable traders to find a counterparty at short notice, exchanges often require less liquid stocks to have market makers. A market maker places buy and sell orders simultaneously, with a spread between the two prices so that they can profit from each transaction. For instance Diurnal Group PLC has had no trades today and no quotes. It has a more complicated order book, enabling both ordinary buyers and sellers to list if they wish, but market makers are separated out at the top. Here you can see that three market makers are providing liquidity on this stock, Peel Hunt (PEEL), Numis (NUMS) and Winterflood (WINS). They have a very unpalatable spread of over 5% between their bid and offer prices. Further in each case the sum total that they are willing to trade is 3000 shares. If you have more than three thousand Dirunal Group shares to sell, you would have to wait for the market makers to come back with a new quote after you'd sold the first 3000. Absolutely. In fact, all stock purchases of more than 5% of a company's stock must be reported to the SEC, so assuming A and B are publicly traded companies in the US, the purchase would likely be a matter of public record.  There are probably special cases where this could cause problems, however; any case where A's purchase of B's stock (or vice versa) runs afoul of regulation would be one such case. For example, if company A wants to own a controlling interest in company B and appoint members of its board of directors and both companies were in the same heavily-concentrated market, regulators may frown on the potential for decreased competition. Such regulations may apply to any purchase of a controlling interest in a company, though. If you prefer the stock rather than cash, you might find it easier to take the cash, report it, and then buy the same stock from within your own country. The more the stock is worth, the more it needs to rise to make a profit. You can buy some stock from Google or amazon, but that's about all the stock you'd have... Start small with companies you know and trust that have an upward trend. No, you shouldn't buy it. The advice here is to keep any existing holdings but not make new purchases of the stock. "This is a complicated subject, because professional traders don't rely on brokers for stock quotes.  They have access to market data using Level II terminals, which show them all of the prices (buy and sell) for a given stock.   Every publicly traded stock (at least in the U.S.) relies on firms called ""market makers"".  Market makers are the ones who ultimately actually buy and sell the shares of companies, making their money on the difference between what they bought the stock at and what they can sell it for.  Sometimes those margins can be in hundreds of a cent per share, but if you trade enough shares...well, it adds up. The most widely traded stocks (Apple, Microsoft, BP, etc) may have hundreds of market makers who are willing to handle share trades.  Each market maker sets their own price on what they'll pay (the ""bid"") to buy someone's stock who wants to sell and what they'll sell (the ""ask"") that share for to someone who wants to buy it.   When a market maker wants to be competitive, he may price his bid/ask pretty aggressively, because automated trading systems are designed to seek out the best bid/ask prices for their trade executions.  As such, you might get a huge chunk of market makers in a popular stock to all set their prices almost identically to one another.  Other market makers who aren't as enthusiastic will set less competitive prices, so they don't get much (maybe no) business.  In any case, what you see when you pull up a stock quote is called the ""best bid/ask"" price.  In other words, you're seeing the highest price a market maker will pay to buy that stock, and the lowest price that a market maker will sell that stock.  You may get a best bid from one market maker and a best ask from a different one.  In any case, consumers must be given best bid/ask prices. Market makers actually control the prices of shares.  They can see what's out there in terms of what people want to buy or sell, and they modify their prices accordingly.  If they see a bunch of sell orders coming into the system, they'll start dropping prices, and if people are in a buying mood then they'll raise prices. Market makers can actually ignore requests for trades (whether buy or sell) if they choose to, and sometimes they do, which is why a limit order (a request to buy/sell a stock at a specific price, regardless of its current actual price) that someone places may go unfilled and die at the end of the trading session.  No market maker is willing to fill the order. Nowadays, these systems are largely automated, so they operate according to complex rules defined by their owners.  Very few trades actually involve human intervention, because people can't digest the information at a fast enough pace to keep up with automated platforms. So that's the basics of how share prices work.  I hope this answered your question without being too confusing! Good luck!" First: the question is irrelevant for purchases on exchange, mostly. Majority of sales on stock exchanges is between shareholders. If however you buy directly from the company (in a IPO, or direct share purchase program of some kind, like ESPP), then it does end up showing in the company account ledgers one way or another. It then become part of company's total assets, and the newly sold shares add to the equity. "Shares sold to private investors are sold using private contracts and do not adhere to the same level of strict regulations as publicly traded shares. You may have different classes of shares in the company with different strings attached to them, depending on the deals made with the investors at the time. Since public cannot negotiate, the IPO prospectus is in fact the investment contract between the company and the public, and the requirements to what the company can put there are much stricter than private sales. Bob may not be able to sell his ""special"" stocks on the public exchange, as the IPO specifies which class of stock is being listed for trading, and Bob's is not the same class. He can sell it on the OTC market, which is less regulated, and then the buyer has to do his due diligence. Yes, OTC-sold stocks may have strings attached to them (for example a buy back option at a preset time and price)."