For me, Yahoo Finance is by far the best tool to use when looking at new potential companies to invest in. I personally use it every single day to research stocks I’m currently interested in but also to keep track of the stocks that I already own. In this article, I’m going to be taking you through the “Summary Page” and breaking down the different sections.
But before I get started, we’re going to need an example company to look at and why not take the largest stock in America (by Market Cap) with Apple.
Right, so now we have our example company all set up within our summary page, let’s dive into the sections within the red box I have highlighted.
Previous Close – This is the price that the stock finished at on the previous trading day. If you didn’t know already, the typical trading hours for the stock market is 9:30am – 4:00pm Eastern Time.
Open – This is starting price for the stock on todays trading day. One thing you may notice is a slight difference between the Previous Close and the Open. This is because “After Hours Trading” takes place, but I will save that for another article.
Bid – The bid price refers to the highest price a buyer will pay for a share.
Ask – The ask price refers to the lowest price a seller would accept for the share.
Day’s Range – The days range is the highest and lowest prices that the stock has traded at within that day. For example, the lowest price Apple Stock has been today is $125.21 and the highest has been $128.00. If at anything time the current stock price was to go below or above these numbers, they would then in turn update.
52 Week Range – Very Similar to the days range, the 52 week range is the highest and lowest price that the stock has traded at within the past year (52 weeks).
Volume – This is the total amount of shares that have either been bought or sold during that trading day.
Average Volume – This is the average amount of shares that normally gets traded during a trading day. As you can see in this example, Apple has seen a little bit of a quieter day than they usually do within the market.
Market Cap – This is the current value of the company. This can be worked out by multiplying the price per share by how many outstanding shares there currently are.
PE Ratio – The is the Price to Earnings Ratio for that company. This is worked out by dividing the price of a share by the earnings per share (EPS). This is a great way of working out a value for a company. Typically, the lower the P/E ratio, the more value in the stock that you’re buying.
EPS – This means Earnings Per Share. This is calculated by dividing the current profit by the outstanding shares for a company. You typically want to see this number rise, however in new companies (Tesla) that currently make no profit as they are expanding fast, you will see a EPS of 0.
Earnings Date – If you are a public company, it is in your legal right to share your quarterly earnings and balance sheet with your investors and the public. This is essentially the estimated date that the company will report their next quarter earnings.
Forward Dividend & Yield – This is the amount in currency and percentage that the company last paid in dividends.
Ex- Dividend Date – This is the date that you have to be invested into that company by to be able to receive the next dividend payment.
1y Target Estimate – This is the price that Analysts believe the stock to be at around 1 year from now. However, I would never personally listen to this figure because Analysts know as much as us in terms of guessing the stock price. Let’s put it this way, if someone could predict the price of every stock in the next year, we would all just be millionaires, right?
Hope you found this helpful, if you would like to see my full walkthrough of Yahoo Finance where I go into a few extra things, feel free to check out the video from my YouTube channel below.
The post How to use Yahoo Finance to research stocks appeared first on Christos Fellas.
