Can you please explain what the information in this stock quote means?
Yes, that's what it means. Also, it tells you that the share price went up by $0.39 yesterday, which was an increase of 1.43% from the previous day's price, and that the total value of all of Microsoft's shares is $232.18 billion (from which we can deduce that there are a bit less than 10 billion Microsoft shares in total).
"This is analyst speak for ""the stock isn't going anywhere anytime soon"". Remember these guys are offering advice to the entire universe in a few lines, so the advice gets fortune cookie-like. When I look at these things, I care more about when the analyst changes their opinion more than what the opinion is. If you really trust this person, you should listen to the earnings call for the stock (or read the transcript) and listen for the questions asked by the analyst. Usually you'll be able to understand why the analyst feels the way he does." "Learn something new every day... I found this interesting and thought I'd throw my 2c in. Good description (I hope) from Short Selling: What is Short Selling First, let's describe what short selling means when you purchase shares of stock. In purchasing stocks, you buy a piece of ownership in the company. You buy/sell stock to gain/sell ownership of a company. When an investor goes long on an investment, it means that he or she has bought a stock believing its price will rise in the future. Conversely, when an investor goes short, he or she is anticipating a decrease in share price. Short selling is the selling of a stock that the seller doesn't own. More specifically, a short sale is the sale of a security that isn't owned by the seller, but that is promised to be delivered.  Still with us? Here's the skinny: when you short sell a stock, your broker will lend it to you. The stock will come from the brokerage's own inventory, from another one of the firm's customers, or from another brokerage firm. The shares are sold and the proceeds are credited to your account. Sooner or later, you must ""close"" the short by buying back the same number of shares (called covering) and returning them to your broker. If the price drops, you can buy back the stock at the lower price and make a profit on the difference. If the price of the stock rises, you have to buy it back at the higher price, and you lose money. So what happened? The Plan The Reality Lesson I never understood what ""Shorting a stock"" meant until today. Seems a bit risky for my blood, but I would assume this is an extreme example of what can go wrong. This guy literally chose the wrong time to short a stock that was, in all visible aspects, on the decline.  How often does a Large Company or Individual buy stock on the decline... and send that stock soaring? How often does a stock go up 100% in 24 hours? 600%?  Another example is recently when Oprah bought 10% of Weight Watchers and caused the stock to soar %105 in 24 hours. You would have rued the day you shorted that stock - on that particular day - if you believed enough to ""gamble"" on it going down in price." Im an actor preparing for a role. I play a trader in the UK during the late 80s. I have a very basic understanding of the stock market and am unsure what some of the dialogue is referring to. For example: “bid 28 at the figure” “sell at 3” “5 march at 28” “9 for 5” “bid 4 at 6” “closing out now at 4”. What do these numbers mean exactly. It doesn’t help that im Australian and this is a UK production, or that im an idiot "I think the key concept here is future value.  The NAV is essentially a book-keeping exercise- you add up all the assets and remove all the liabilities.  For a public company this is spelled out in the balance sheet, and is generally listed at the bottom.  I pulled a recent one from Cisco Systems (because I used to work there and know the numbers  ;-) and you can see it here: roughly $56 billion... https://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=CSCO+Balance+Sheet&annual  Another way to think about it: In theory (and we know about this, right?) the NAV is what you would get if you liquidated the company instantaneously.  A definition I like to use for market cap is ""the current assets, plus the perceived present value of all future earnings for the company""... so let's dissect that a little.  The term ""present value"" is really important, because a million dollars today is worth more than a million dollars next year.  A company expected to make a lot of money soon will be worth more (i.e. a higher market cap) than a company expected to make the same amount of money, but later.  The ""all future earnings"" part is exactly what it sounds like.  So again, following our cisco example, the current market cap is ~142 billion, which means that ""the market"" thinks they will earn about $85 billion over the life of the company (in present day dollars)." "Okay, I'm going to give you my opinion based on experience; not any technical understanding. The options - by themselves - are pretty meaningless in terms of determining their value. The business plan going forward, their growth expectations, the additional options to be authorized, the additional preferred stock offers they anticipate, even current estimated value of the company are some of the pieces of data you will be needing. I also want to say something cynical, like ""to hell with the stock options give me cold hard"" but that's just me. (My experience two-times so far has shown stock options to be worth very very little.)" It's a phrase that has no meaning out of context.  When I go to Las Vegas (I don't go, but if I did) I would treat what I took as money I plan to lose.  When I trade stock options and buy puts or calls, I view it as a calculated risk, with a far greater than zero chance of having the trade show zero in time.  A single company has a chance of going bankrupt. A mix of stocks has risk, the S&P was at less than half its high in the 2008 crash. The money I had in the S&P was not money I could afford to lose, but I could afford to wait it out. There's a difference. We're not back at the highs, but we're close.  By the way, there are many people who would not sleep knowing that their statement shows a 50% loss from a prior high point. Those people should be in a mix more suited to their risk tolerance. The 10-K language is very specific. And as someone that has worked w/ securities attorneys to write these things, I know it is worded like that for a reason. Regardless, to have that risk factor in there and not disclose executives leaving is really shoddy disclosure. "In the Income Statement that you've linked to, look for the line labeled ""Net Income"". That's followed by a line labeled ""Preferred Dividends"", which is followed by ""Income Available to Common Excl. Extra Items"" and ""Income Available to Common Incl. Extra Items"". Those last two are the ones to look at. The key is that these lines reflect income minus dividends paid to preferred stockholders (of which there are none here), and that's income that's available to ordinary shareholders, i.e., ""earnings for the common stock""." "I'm not sure the term actually has a clear meaning. We can think of ""what does this mean"" in two ways: its broad semantic/metaphorical meaning, and its mechanical ""what actual variables in the market represent this quantity"". Net buying/selling have a clear meaning in the former sense by analogy to the basic concept of supply and demand in equilibrium markets. It's not as clear what their meaning should be in the latter sense. Roughly, as the top comment notes, you could say that a price decrease is because of net selling at the previous price level, while a price rise is driven by net buying at the previous price level. But in terms of actual market mechanics, the only way prices move is by matching of a buyer and a seller, so every market transaction inherently represents an instantaneous balance across the bid/ask spread. So then we could think about the notion of orders. Actual transactions only occur in balance, but there is a whole book of standing orders at various prices. So maybe we could use some measure of the volume at various price levels in each of the bid/ask books to decide some notion of net buying/selling. But again, actual transactions occur only when matched across the spread. If a significant order volume is added on one side or the other, but at a price far away from the bid/offer - far enough that an actual trade at that price is unlikely to occur - should that be included in the notion of net buying/selling? Presumably there is some price distance from the bid/offer where the orders don't matter for net buying/selling. I'm sure you'd find a lot of buyers for BRK.A at $1, but that's completely irrelevant to the notion of net buying/selling in BRK.A. Maybe the closest thing I can think of in terms of actual market mechanics is the comparative total volumes during the period that would still have been executed if forced to execute at the end of period price. Assuming that traders' valuations are fixed through the period in question, and trading occurs on the basis of fundamentals (which I know isn't a good assumption in practice, but the impact of price history upon future price is too complex for this analysis), we have two cases. If price falls, we can assume all buyers who executed above the last price in the period would have happily bought at the last price (saving money), while all sellers who executed below the last price in the period would also be happy to sell for more. The former will be larger than the latter. If the price rises, the reverse is true." Some platforms/brokers have HTB indication for a stock symbol, meaning Hard To Borrow. That usually means you can't sell it short at the moment. "Can you give me a rundown of what I'm seeing?  Is this basically a super zoomed in tracker of a current stock or something?  Where a stock fluctuates a few cents up/down on the day, and you just trade before it goes down, then trade as it goes up or what?  EDIT: Is this really live?  Can you say, ""Yes this is live narwalls""" To be fair, the analyst is talking about the book value of the firm. Basically, the value of all the stuff it owns now. There are plenty of companies with negative book value that can justify a positive share price. Ford, for instance, had negative book value but positive future earnings. Include warnings that these numbers are estimates and are not adjusted for the market impact and tax impact of selling these shares. They need to stop pondering to the followers of the Prosperity Theology and get their analysis changed. Going to the shareholders page and just adding up their shares in comparison to the current price is lazy and not a good indicator. "Usually insiders are in a better position than you to understand their business, but that doesn't mean they will know the future with perfect accuracy. Sometimes they are wrong, sometimes life events force them to liquidate an otherwise promising investment, sometimes their minds change. So while it is indeed valuable information, as everything in fundamental analysis it must be taken with a grain of salt. Automatic Sell I think these refer to how the sell occurred. Often the employees don't get actual shares but options or warrants that can be converted to shares. Or there may be special predetermined arrangements regarding when and how the shares may be traded. Since the decision to sell here has nothing to do with the prospects of the business, but has to do with the personal situation of the employee, it's not quite the same as outright selling due to market concerns. Some people, for instance, are not interested in holding stock. Part of their compensation is given in stock, so they immediately sell the stock to avoid the headache of watching an investment. This obviously doesn't indicate that they expect the company will go south. I think automatic sell refers to these sorts of situations, but your broker should provide a more detailed definition. Disposition (Non Open Market) These days people trade through a broker, but there's nothing stopping you from taking the physical shares and giving them to someone in exchange for say a stack of cash. With a broker, you only ""sell"" without considering who is buying. The broker then finds buyers for you according to their own system. If selling without a broker you can also be choosy with who is buying, and it's not like anybody can just call up the CEO and ask to buy some stock, so it's a non-open market. Ultimately though it's still the insider selling. Just on a different exchange. So I would treat this as any insider sell - if they are selling, they may be expecting the stock to become less valuable. indirect ownership I think this refers to owning an entity that in turn owns the asset. For instance CEO of XYZ owns stock in ACME, but ACME holds shares of XYZ. This is a somewhat complicated situation, it comes down to whether you think they sold ACME because of the exposure to XYZ or because of some other risk that applies only to ACME and not XYZ. Generally speaking, I don't think you would find a rule like ""if insider transactions of so and so kinds > X then buy"" that provides guaranteed success. If such a rule was possible it would have been exploited already by the professionals. The more sensible option is to consider all data available to you and try to make a holistic evaluation. All of these insider activities can be bullish or bearish depending on many other factors." "Sell 200 at 142. What does that mean? I haven't seen the movie, so I won't try to put anything in story context.  ""Sell 200 at 142"" means to sell 200 units (usually shares, but in this case it would likely be gallons or barrels of orange juice or pounds or tons of frozen juice).   In general, this could mean that you have 200 units and want to sell what you have.  Or you could borrow 200 units from someone and sell those--this is called a naked short.  In this case, it seems that what they are selling is a futures contract.  With a futures contract, you are promising to obtain orange juice by some future date and sell it for the agreed price.  You could own an orange grove and plan to turn your oranges into juice.  Or you could buy a futures contract of oranges to turn into juice.  Or you could arbitrage two futures contracts such that one supplies the other, what they're doing here.   In general people make profits by buying low and selling high.  In this case they did so in reverse order.  They took the risk of selling before they had a supply.  Then they covered their position by purchasing the supply.  They profited because the price at which they bought was lower than the price at which they sold.   The reason why this is necessary is that before buying the oranges, the orange juice makers need to know that they can make a profit.  So they sell orange juice on the futures market.  Then they know how much they can afford to pay for oranges on a different market.  And the growers know how much they can get for oranges, so they can pay people to water and pick them.   Without the futures markets, growers and orange juice makers would have to take all the risk themselves.  This way, they can share risks with each other and financiers.  Combined with insurance, this allows for predictable finances.  Without it, growers would have to be wealthy to afford the variation in crop yields and prices."