Can two companies own stock in each other?
Yes, this can and does certainly happen. When two companies each own stock in each other, it's called a cross holding. I learned about cross holdings in reference to Japanese companies (see Wikipedia - Keiretsu) but the phenomenon is certainly not exclusive to that jurisdiction.  Here are a few additional references: 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. I was looking at NAT and NAO, NAT owns 20% of NAO.  They trade opposite each other on the price of oil, low is good for NAT, bad for NAO.  In bad times the other company's stock would probably rise, so they could trim excess shares to keep a stable monetary holding.  This would create cash in bad times, in good times they could buy more, creating a floor as well for the other. Yes, this happens a lot. And in many cases companies don't even know this is happening. Collateralized Debt Obligations frequently contain pieces of the same financial products, where it is not obvious what the underlying asset is. It gets complicated to explain, but I can make an analogy to a portfolio of stocks you might create. Your portfolio contains companies and those companies also own some of the other companies in your same portfolio. The value of all the companies in your portfolio are very interrelated even though you thought you made diversified investments, under the idea that they can't all do poorly at the exact same time. Except they can, if the value of the company's shares are solely based on the value of other company's shares, but nobody noticed that none of them have an actual robust operations. This was a key factor of the financial disaster around 2008, but this problem was solved with the addition of additional disclaimers that all investors agree to, so they know what they are buying
The CEO of a public company can, and often does, buy (and sell) the stock of his company. In fact, frequently the stock of the company is part of the compensation for the CEO. What makes this legal and fair is that the CEO files with the SEC an announcement before he buys (or sells) the stock. These announcements allow us 'in the dark' people enough warning ahead of time.  See, for example, the trades of UTX stock by their public officers. As for trading on information about other companies, if I am not mistaken... that is why Martha Stewart wound up in prison. So, yeah, it does happen. I hope it is caught more often than not.  On a related note, have you seen the movie 'Wall Street' with Charlie Sheen and Michael Douglas? I am probably not the most qualified person, but I have taken some managerial finance courses.  If company B is still in tact, has its own documentation saying it's a company and all that, the only income company A would need to claim from B is that which B profited and the profits were given to A.  I see the above scenario similar to owning an asset, like a bond, which pays you interest.  If the companies are merged, most definitely but that probably wasn't your question. "In a sentence, stocks are a share of equity in the company, while bonds are a share of credit to the company. When you buy one share of stock, you own a (typically infinitesimal) percentage of the company. You are usually entitled to a share of the profits of that company, and/or to participate in the business decisions of that company. A particular type of stock may or may not pay dividends, which is the primary way companies share profits with their stockholders (the other way is simply by increasing the company's share value by being successful and thus desirable to investors). A stock also may or may not allow you to vote on company business; you may hear about companies buying 20% or 30% ""interests"" in other companies; they own that percentage of the company, and their vote on company matters is given that same weight in the total voting pool. Typically, a company offers two levels of stocks: ""Common"" stock usually has voting rights attached, and may pay dividends. ""Preferred"" stock usually gives up the voting rights, but pays a higher dividend percentage (maybe double or triple that of common stock) and may have payment guarantees (if a promised dividend is missed in one quarter and then paid in the next, the preferred stockholders get their dividend for the past and present quarters before the common shareholders see a penny). Governments and non-profits are typically prohibited from selling their equity; if a government sold stock it would basically be taxing everyone and then paying back stockholders, while non-profit organizations have no profits to pay out as dividends. Bonds, on the other hand, are a slice of the company's debt load. Think of bonds as kind of like a corporate credit card. When a company needs a lot of cash, it will sell bonds. A single bond may be worth $10, $100, or $1000, depending on the investor market being targeted. This is the amount the company will pay the bondholder at the end of the term of the bond. These bonds are bought by investors on the open market for less than their face value, and the company uses the cash it raises for whatever purpose it wants, before paying off the bondholders at term's end (usually by paying each bond at face value using money from a new package of bonds, in effect ""rolling over"" the debt to the next cycle, similar to you carrying a balance on your credit card). The difference between the cost and payoff is the ""interest charge"" on this slice of the loan, and can be expressed as a percentage of the purchase price over the remaining term of the bond, as its ""yield"" or ""APY"". For example, a bond worth $100 that was sold on Jan 1 for $85 and is due to be paid on Dec 31 of the same year has an APY of (15/85*100) = 17.65%. Typically, yields for highly-rated companies are more like 4-6%; a bond that would yield 17% is very risky and indicates a very low bond rating, so-called ""junk status""." It basically only affects the company's dealings with its own stock, not with operational concerns.  If the company were to offer more stock for sale, it would get less cash.  If it had a stock buy-back program, it could buy more shares for the same money.  If it was to offer to acquire another company in exchange for its own stock, the terms would be less attractive to the other company's owners.  Employee stock remuneration, stock options, and so forth would be affected, so there might be considerations and tax consequences for the company. Stock acquired through a (non-taxable) stock dividend has the same holding period as the stock on which the dividend was paid. Yes, but only if they're looking for investors. You would need to contact them directly. Unless you're looking to invest a significant sum, they may not be interested in speaking with you. (Think at least 6 figures, maybe 7 depending on their size and needs). This is otherwise known as being a Venture Capitalist. Some companies don't want additional investors because the capital isn't yet needed and they don't want to give up shares in the profit/control. Alternatively, you could try and figure out which investment groups already have a stake in the company you're interested in. If those companies are publicly traded, you could buy stocks for their company with the expectation that their stock price will increase if the company you know of does well in the long run. For all practical purposes the words mean the same thing.  Shares are just stock in a particular company whereas stock can refer to shares over many companies. Investopedia has a good explaination. If you are a financial journalist you might want to make sure you are using the right term at the right time, but otherwise they are synonyms. Energy Transfer Partners, LP (stock symbol ETP) is the parent company of Dakota Access LLC, the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Since ETP is a publicly traded company, it is certainly possible to purchase the stock. To answer your questions: Would it not be possible to buy their stocks, bring down the price of the stocks and keep it there until investors pull out because it is financially unwise to these investors? You cannot artificially bring the price of a stock down by buying the stock.  Purchasing large enough amounts would theoretically cause the price to go up, not down. You could theoretically cause the stock to go down by shorting the stock (borrowing shares and then selling them), but it would take a lot of shares to do this, and may not be successful.  If not successful, your losses are potentially unlimited. Would it alternatively be possible to buy enough stock to have a voice in the operations of the company? Yes, you could theoretically purchase enough of the stock to control the company.  The market capitalization of ETP is currently $17.9 Billion; if you owned half of the stock, you would have complete control of the company.  But buying that much stock would certainly influence the price of the stock, so it would cost you more than half of that amount to buy that much stock. You could get yourself a voice at the table for less without owning a full half of the stock, but you would not have full control, and would need support from others to get the outcome you want. Alternatively, someone determined to exert their influence could theoretically make an offer to purchase the Dakota Access subsidiary from ETP, which might be less costly than purchasing half of the entire corporation. Even if an extremely wealthy person were to try one of these options and destroy this company, it wouldn't necessarily stop another company from building something similar.  The investors you purchased the company from would have billions of dollars to do so with. If a company is public, and they record a 2016 profit of 100mil. Say there is shareholder A and shareholder B who are both wealthy and own 25% each of the company. Say the remaining 50% of shares are owned by a number of funds/small time investors.   So 2016 profits are 100mil, lets say there is a dividend. Can the company still award a larger share of profits to the two big shareholders? I.e. say 50 mil of the profits go into dividend payments and another 20 mil as retained earnings to be reinvested into future projects, can the remaining 30 mil of profits be split and given to shareholders A and B? I don't think that you will be able to find a list of every owner for a given stock. There are probably very few people who would know this. One source would be whoever sends out the shareholder meeting mailers.  I suspect that the company itself would know this, the exchange to a lesser extent, and possibly the brokerage houses to a even lesser extent. Consider these resources: Sure they can (most publicly traded banks at least) - and they do it a lot. Many banks have a proprietary trading desk, or Prop desk, where traders are buying and selling shares of publicly traded companies on behalf of the bank, with the bank's own money. This is as opposed to regular trading desks where the banks trade on behalf of their customers. When you own a share, you also own a vote (in most cases). That vote is your means of controlling the assets and management of the company. If you had enough votes and wanted to trade a share for an iPhone or liquidate the company entirely, you could do it. The only thing that prevents you from doing that is that companies are not set up to handle the transaction that way. Stock holders are usually trying to buy investments, not iPhones. There are companies that have more cash in the bank than the market cap (total value) of their stock. They usually don't remain as public companies for long in that case. An investor or group of investors buy them up and split the cash. If you had enough shares of Apple, you could do that to; or, just trade one for an iPhone. "Ditto to MD-Tech, but from a more ""philosophical"" point of view: When you buy stock, you own it, just like you own a cell phone or a toaster or a pair of socks that you bought. The difference is that a share of stock means that you own a piece of a corporation. You can't physically take possession of it and put it in your garage, because if all the stock-holders did that, then all the company's assets would be scattered around all the stock-holder's garages and the company couldn't function. Like if you bought a 1/11 share in a football team, you couldn't take one of the football players home and keep him in your closet, because then the team wouldn't be able to function. (I might want to take one of the cheerleaders home, but that's another subject ...) In pre-electronic times, you could get a piece of paper that said, ""XYZ Corporation - 1 share"". You could take physical possession of this piece of paper and put it in your filing cabinet. I'm not sure if you can even get such certificates any more; I haven't seen one in decades. These days it's just recorded electronically. That doesn't mean that you don't own it. It just means that someone else is keeping the records for you. It's like leaving your car in a parking lot. It's still your car. The people who run the parking lot doesn't own it. They are keeping it for you, but just because they have physical possession doesn't make it theirs." Stocks represent partial ownership of the company. So, if you owned 51% of the stock of the company (and therefore 51% of the company itself), you could decide to liquidate all the  assets of the company, and you would be entitled to 51% of the proceeds from that sale.  In the example above, it would have to be Common Stock, as preferred stock does not confer ownership. *In a situation where it is not possible to buy 51% or more of the company (for example, it's not for sale), this is not possible, so the value of the stock could be much less. www.mint.com is a very good web site that can upload your financial data from your bank and analyze it for you. Security concerns seem to have been addressed reassuringly.