1. When a stock is listed as being "343 points", what's that in dollars?

2. Mkt Cap stands for Market Capitalisation, am I right? And it is the total value of the company according to the stock exchange (ie the number of shares, times the share price.)

3. Earn/Shr on this particular stock is "-0.18". Does this mean that the company is LOSING money and the investors have to pay 18c every month/quarter/year as a kind of reverse dividend?

4. What are "Volume" and "Avg Vol"?

--Leo

-- Leo (lchampion@ozemail.com.au), January 08, 1999

Answers

1. I'm not sure about this one. I think of points as they relate to stock indexes like the Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq, AMEX. Also, there are points involved in the information that brokers use, but I'm not sure exactly what those points mean.

2. Mkt Cap is Market Capitalization. I think that actually means the number of shares X the stock price. Understand that Mkt Cap is a tricky thing. For example: TSG shows a market cap of 5 billion dollars, but only 20% of the company is actually traded publicly. The other 80% is privately held by AMR corporation. (Read the prospectus.)

3. Earnings per share. The company actually gets their money when they "issue" the stock. The first time stock is offered by a company, it's called IPO or Initial Public Offering. From time to time, companies issue more stock, usually called "offerings". The point is that negative earnings in theory should take money away from the investor. However, you have to remember that accounting has really become a "shell game" for most companies, hiding earnings. So the company could have made a profit in cash, but after holding back "escrow" and "contingency" accounts, they could "lose" money. And the inverse is also true. Some companies, particularly now that the "real world" economy is softening will play accounting tricks to make the company look like it's making more money than it is. Do you own research. Ask questions.

4. Vol is the daily sales volume of a stock. Avg volume is an average of the daily volumes for a period of time (1 year?), but I'm not sure exactly what the period of time is. When volume is high relative to daily volume, something's going on. (The market is reacting to news.)

HTH

Glen Austin

-- Glen Austin (gdaustin@aol.com), January 09, 1999.

Correction.

When daily volume is high relative to average volume, something is going on.

-- Glen Austin (gdaustin@aol.com), January 09, 1999.

This is not Y2k-related.

-- No Spam Please (anon@ymous.com), January 09, 1999.

Coming under the heading of Y2K Basic Education:

Points=Dollars as a per share sale price (for one company or stock. For the Dow. it is the cost of (I believe) 1 share each of the 30 Industrials, or of the n (fill in the blank - transportation issues, etc.))

cr

-- Chuck, night driver (rienzoo@en.com), January 09, 1999.