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You can find
out about specific stocks on websites
like
Morning Star.
Let's check
out how The Gap is doing... They
run Old Navy, Banana Republic and, of
course, The Gap stores.
When you get to
Morning Star, you can type in the
company name (The Gap) or what's called
the "ticker" which, in this case is GPS.
(A ticker is an abbreviation for a
company -- usually, 1 to 4 letters
long.) Here's the first page that
comes up:
Overview of The Gap
The first
information you see is the price of what
one share of this stock is selling for
today and whether the stock is up or
down (doing better or not).
I like to look
at the graphs to get a good picture of
how things are going... (This isn't The
Gap -- I just made it up.)
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Legend: |
This color line is the
stock. |
|
(This tells what color is
for what.) |
This color line is the
"index" or category.
(This
tells how other stocks of
this type are doing.) |
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This color line is the
"market."
(This
tells how everything else is
doing in comparison.) |
(You can see
the graph for The Gap at Morning Star by clicking
on "snapshot", then on the "interactive
graph" button. Look at their
legend to see what the colors stand for!) You also get a
good set of numbers of how the price of
this stock has changed (got up or down)
over the last 5 years. It will be
listed with the price and the gain (or
loss) will be listed as a percent of the
change.
Sites like Morning
Star are a great place to get
recommendations on what to buy -- and,
more importantly, what NOT TO BUY!
You can
search for more information about stocks using our Google "safe
search" option. Or you can search for a different
topic on Finance FREAK. A new window will open
with your results.
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