What is the difference between trading and non-trading stock?
Every company has Stocks.   For the stocks to be traded via some stock exchange, the companies must follow the eligibility criteria and guidelines. Once done, these are then listed on the stock exchange and can be traded. The advantage [amongst others] of listing is liquidity and stocks can easily be bought and sold.  Some small companies or closely held companies may not want to list on stock exchange and hence are not traded. This does not mean they can't be bought and sold, they can be outside of the market, however the deals are complex and every deal has to be worked out. During the course of time a stock that is traded on a stock exchange, would either fail to meet the criteria or voluntarily choose not to be traded and follow the delisting process [either by stock exchange or by company]. After this the stocks are no longer traded on the exchange. "A non-trading stock or non-marketable security or unlisted security is one that does not trade continually on an exchange. For tax purposes, this can mean a whole new ball of wax which I would prefer the experts address with an edit to this answer or a new answer. For financial accounting purposes, this is when, say, one owns shares in an unlisted corporation and should be treated very carefully less one delude oneself. For trading stock, the value can be known immediately by checking any valid data provider's price and marking to market.  For non-trading stock, the value has to be ""marked to model"".  This can get one into Enron sized trouble. In this case, it's best to either leave the value of the stock at the purchase price and recognize gains upon sale, use a price from another honest transaction by third parties which are most likely difficult to attain, or to use some shorthand measure like applying the market P/E. Be wary of strangely high figures for value from the purchase price by using a market average, and don't throw away the shares just yet if a strangely low one arises.  This method can lead to strange results."
Non-electronic stock exchanges still exist because they used to exist. There are a lot of people in trading firms who grew up with floor trading and don't want to give it up, either because they feel more comfortable with it or because they might lose their job if they went away from it. Forex vs Day Trading: These can be one and the same, as most people who trade forex do it as day trading. Forex is the instrument you are trading and day trading is the time frame you are doing it in. If your meaning from your question was comparing trading forex vs stocks, then it depends on a number of things. Forex is more liquid so most professional traders prefer it as it can be easier to get in and out without being gapped. However, if you are not trading large amounts of money and you stay away from more volatile stocks, this should not matter too much. It may also depend on what you understand more and prefer to trade. You need to be comfortable with what you are trading. If on the other hand you are referring to day trading vs longer term trading and/or investing, then this can depend largely on the instrument you are trading and the time frame you are more comfortable with. Forex is used more for shorter term trading, from day trading to having a position open for a couple of days. Stocks on the other hand can be day traded to traded over days, weeks, months or years. It is much more common to have positions open for longer periods with stocks. Other instruments like commodities, can also be traded over different time frames. The shorter the time frame you trade the higher risk involved as you have to make quick decisions and be happy with making a lot of smaller gains with the potential to make a large loss if things go wrong. It is best once again to chose a time frame you are comfortable with. I tend to trade Australian stocks as I know them well and am comfortable with them. I usually trade in the medium to long term, however I let the market decide how long I am in a position and when I get out of it. I try to follow the trend and stay in a position as long as the trend continues. I put automatic stop losses on all my positions, so if the market turns against me I am automatically taken out. I can be in a position for as little as a day (can happen if I buy one day and the next day the stock falls by 15% or more) to over a year (as long as the trend continues). By doing this I avoid the daily market noise and let my profits run and keep my losses small. No matter what instrument you end up trading and the time frame you choose to trade in, you should always have a tested trading plan and a risk management strategy in place. These are the areas you should first gain knowledge in to further your pursuits in trading. Electronic trading is many orders of magnitude cheaper and more liquid than floor trading and is rapidly displacing it. Stil, electronic trading accounts for 79% of stock trading volume in the U.S. Polcari is losing the battle. Floor trading is still offered, but it's only used for bulk orders, so electronic trading is servicing small trades at minimum prices while floor trading is now the concierge service. What does it mean when some one says that today there was a lot of net selling or buying in a stock. What does it mean because for every selling there is also a buying going on then how can you determine a selling or buying ? Generally if the price of stock has gone down compared to previous day, the trend is of selling. As the price can be volatile, there maybe few trades that are above close price of previous day, or below close price of previous day.  How can you calculate average trade price for a stock It is simple {sum of all [price*quantity]}/quantity. Related question Equity market inflow meaning Stock markets are supposed to be about investment and providing capital to companies for operations and research.  High frequency trading is only about gaming the market and nothing else.  Arguments that this provides more capital or liquidity don't make any sense because the speed of trading is such that listed companies cannot take advantage and only high frequency traders are served. "I think you've got basics, but you may have the order / emphasis a bit wrong. I've changed the order of the things you've learned in to what I think is the most important to understand: Owning a stock is like owning a tiny chunk of the business Owning stock is owning a tiny chunk of the business, it's not just ""like"" it. The ""tiny chunks"" are called shares, because that is literally what they are, a share of the business. Sometimes shares are also called stocks. The words stock and share are mostly interchangeable, but a single stock normally means your holding of many shares in a business, so if you have 100 shares in 1 company, that's a stock in that company, if you then buy 100 shares in another company, you now own 2 stocks. An investor seeks to buy stocks at a low price, and sell when the price is high. Not necessarily. An investor will buy shares in a company that they believe will make them a profit. In general, a company will make a profit and distribute some or all of it to shareholders in the form of dividends. They will also keep back a portion of the profit to invest in growing the company. If the company does grow, it will grow in value and your shares will get more valuable. Price (of a stock) is affected by supply/demand, volume, and possibly company profits The price of a share that you see on a stock ticker is the price that people on the market have exchanged the share for recently, not the price you or I can buy a share for, although usually if people on the market are buying and selling at that price, someone will buy or sell from you at a similar sort of price. In theory, the price will be the companies total value, if you were to own the whole thing (it's market capitalisation) divided by the total number of shares that exist in that company. The problem is that it's very difficult to work out the total value of a company. You can start by counting the different things that it owns (including things like intellectual property and the knowledge and experience of people who work there), subtract all the money it owes in loans etc., and then make an allowance for how much profit you expect the company to make in the future. The problem is that these numbers are all going to be estimates, and different peoples estimates will disagree. Some people don't bother to estimate at all. The market makers will just follow supply and demand. They will hold a few shares in each of many companies that they are interested in. They will advertise a lower price that they are willing to buy at and a higher price that they will sell at all the time. When they hold a lot of a share, they will price it lower so that people buy it from them. When they start to run out, they will price it higher. You will never need to spend more than the market makers price to buy a share, or get less than the market makers price when you come to sell it (unless you want to buy or sell more shares than they are willing to). This is why stock price depends on supply and demand. The other category of people who don't care about the companies they are trading are the high speed traders. They just look at information like the past price, the volume (total amount of shares being exchanged on the market) and many other statistics both from the market and elsewhere and look for patterns. You cannot compete with these people - they do things like physically locate their servers nearer to the stock exchanges buildings to get a few milliseconds time advantage over their competitors to buy shares quicker than them." NSCC illiquid charges are charges that apply to the trading of low-priced over-the counter (OTC) securities with low volumes. Open net buy quantity represents the total unsettled share amount per stock at any given time during a 3-day settlement cycle. Open net buy quantity must be less than 5,000,000 shares per stock for your entire firm Basically, you can't hold a long position of more than 5 million shares in an illiquid OTC stock without facing a fee. You'll still be assessed this fee if you accumulate a long position of this size by breaking your purchase up into multiple transactions. Open net sell quantity represents the total unsettled share amount per stock at any given time during a 3-day settlement cycle. Open net sell quantity must be less than 10% percent of the 20-day average volume If you attempt to sell a number of shares greater than 10% of the stock's average volume over the last 20 days, you'll also be assessed a fee. The first link I included above is just an example, but it makes the important point: you may still be assessed a fee for trading OTC stocks even if your account doesn't meet the criteria because these restrictions are applied at the level of the clearing firm, not the individual client.  This means that if other investors with your broker, or even at another broker that happens to use the same clearing firm, purchase more than 5 million shares in an individual OTC stock at the same time, all of your accounts may face fees, even though individually, you don't exceed the limits. Technically, these fees are assessed to the clearing firm, not the individual investor, but usually the clearing firm will pass the fees along to the broker (and possibly add other charges as well), and the broker will charge a fee to the individual account(s) that triggered the restriction. Also, remember that when buying OTC/pink sheet stocks, your ability to buy or sell is also contingent on finding someone else to buy from/sell to. If you purchase 10,000 shares one day and attempt to sell them sometime in the future, but there aren't enough buyers to buy all 10,000 from you, you might not be able to complete your order at the desired price, or even at all. The traditional role of a stockbroker is to arrange for the buying and selling of stock by finding buyers and sellers at an agreed upon price.  The broker does not purchase the stock for himself but merely arranges for the stock to be traded. A trader is one who purchases stock with the hope of selling it for a gain.  The trader will use a broker to help with the purchase and sale of a stock. "Often these types of trades fall into two different categories.   An error by broker or exchange.  Exchange clearing out part of their books incorrectly is an example.  Most exchanges make firms reopen their positions for after market hours.  There may have been an issue doing so or exchange could incorrectly cancel positions.  I was in the direct feed industry for years and this was a big issue.  At the same time the broker can issue a no limit buy on accident (or has software that is prospecting and said software has a bug or written poorly).   unscrupulous parties looking to feign an upswing or downswing in market.  Let's say you hold 500k shares in a stock that sells for $11.  You could possibly buy 100 shares for $13.  Trust me you will find a seller.  Then you are hoping that people see that trade as a ""norm"" and trade from there, allowing you to rake in $1M for spending an extra $200 - NOTE this is not normal and an extreme example.  This was so common in the early days of NASDAQ after hours that they discontinued using the after hours trades as part of historical information that they keep like daily/yearly high or closing price.  The liquidity allows for manipulation.  It isn't seen as much now since this has been done a million times but it does still happen." I guess the opposite of being hedged is being unhedged. Typically, a hedge is an additional position that you would take on in order to mitigate the potential for losses on another position. I'll give an example: Say that I purchase 100 shares of stock XYZ at $10 per share because I believe its price will increase in the future.  At that point, my full investment of $1000 is at risk, so the position is not hedged. If the price of XYZ decreases to $8, then I've lost $200.  If the price of XYZ increases to $12, then I've gained $200; the profit/loss curve has a linear relationship to the future stock price. Suppose that I decide to hedge my XYZ position by purchasing a put option. I purchase a single option contract (corresponding to my 100 shares) with a strike price of $10 and an expiration date in January 2013 for a price of $0.50/share. This means that until the contract expires, I can always sell my XYZ shares for a minimum of $10.  Therefore, if the price of XYZ decreases to $8, then I've only lost $50 (the price of the option contract), compared to the $200 that I would have lost if the position was unhedged.  Likewise, however, if the price increases to $12, then I've only gained a net total of $150 due to the money I spent on the hedge. (the details of how much money you would actually lose in the hedged scenario are simplified out above; even out-of-the-money options retain some value before expiration, but pricing of options is outside of the scope of this post) So, as a more pointed answer to your question, I would say that the hedged/unhedged status of a position can be characterized by its potential for loss. If you don't have any other assets that will increase in value to offset losses on your position of interest, I would call it unhedged. When you buy a stock, you become a partial owner of the company that the stock is for. As the company is valued at a higher or lower amount, the stock will reflect that by gaining or losing value. You still own that stock. For example, if you bought a stock for $10 per share and next week it is worth $8 dollars per share, the only loss incurred is on paper. You do not have to pay the difference (which I think is what you are asking?) and will only physically lose that money if you sell at that point. Similarly if that stock becomes worth $12, you have only gained money on paper and can only physically see it if you sell at that point. "In financial theory, there is no reason for a difference in investor return to exist between dividend paying and non-dividend paying stocks, except for tax consequences.  This is because in theory, a company can either pay dividends to investors [who can reinvest the funds themselves], or reinvest its capital and earn the same return on that reinvestment [and the shareholder still has the choice to sell a fraction of their holdings, if they prefer to have cash]. That theory may not match reality, because often companies pay or don't pay dividends based on their stage of life.  For example, early-stage mining companies often have no free cashflow to pay dividends [they are capital intensive until the mines are operational]. On the other side, longstanding companies may have no projects left that would be a  good fit for further investment, and so they pay out dividends instead, effectively allowing the shareholder to decide where to reinvest the money. Therefore, saying ""dividend paying""/""growth stock"" can be a proxy for talking about the stage of life + risk and return of a company. Saying dividend paying implies ""long-standing blue chip company with relatively low capital requirements and a stable business"". Likewise ""growth stocks"" [/ non-dividend paying] implies ""new startup company that still needs capital and thus is somewhat unproven, with a chance for good return to match the higher risk"". So in theory, dividend payment policy makes no difference. In practice, it makes a difference for two reasons: (1) You will most likely be taxed differently on selling stock vs receiving dividends [Which one is better for you is a specific question relying on your jurisdiction, your current income, and things like what type of stock / how long you hold it]. For example in Canada, if you earn ~ < $40k, your dividends are very likely to have a preferential tax treatment to selling shares for capital gains [but your province and specific other numbers would influence this]. In the United States, I believe capital gains are usually preferential as long as you hold the shares for a long time [but I am not 100% on this without looking it up]. (2) Dividend policy implies differences in the stage of life / risk level of a stock. This implication is not guaranteed, so be sure you are using other considerations to determine whether this is the case.  Therefore which dividend policy suits you better depends on your tax position and your risk tolerance." "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.""" "There's an expression, ""stock prices have no memory."" Apple trades at about $115. Why would I carry my shares at anything but $115 even though I paid say $75 a share, while you just bought it at $115?  The only difference, perhaps, is that if I hold them in a non retirement account, I might track the net I'd have, post tax." MKC is non-voting stock, MKC/V is voting stock. Ofter times you'll see two or more stock symbols for a company.  These usually reflect different classes of stocks.  For example, voting vs. non-voting (as in this case) or preferred vs non-preferred stock.