Overview – Getting to Know the Stock Table
When performing preliminary investment analysis, one of the tools commonly used to get a quick overview of a prospective investment, specifically a stock, is a stock table.
Search up a prospective investment of your choosing, and chances are one of the first results will be a quick summary of some key metrics and other numerical data that may be of interest to readers. Unless the stock you’re looking at is very obscure, then it’s only a matter of time before you come across a stock table for it.
Stock tables provide investors with a few key bits of information all at once, such as stock price over certain periods, stock price highs and lows, and some ratios such as the P/E ratio. If used properly, stock tables can save investors the trouble of doing unnecessary work. Why waste your time doing something relatively menial when other people have gladly done the work already for free?
In this article, we will look be looking at the different components of a stock table and what sort of information is contained in them. We will be using NVIDIA as our example.
Stock Table – Introduction
Below is a stock table for NVIDIA, retrieved on December 22, 2020:
There is no universal format for a stock table. This particular one was extracted from Google’s finance search option. However, a stock table from Yahoo Finance or Bloomberg may differ slightly.
For the most part, stock tables are approximately the same, save for a few details such as the reported metrics at the bottom and the historical stock price periods.
In this article, we will break down the above stock table into three sections:
- Top Section: this is the data directly above the stock price chart.
- Middle Section: this is where the stock price chart is located.
- Bottom Section: this is where select ratios and metrics are reported.
Stock Table – Top Section Analysis
Stock Exchange and Stock Symbol
Right at the top, you may notice that right below where it says, “NVIDIA Corporation” there is a line that has the words “NASDAQ: NVDA”.
This indicates which exchange the company’s stock is being traded on, and the company’s stock symbol on that exchange. A general form for this is:
Stock Exchange Company is Traded On: Stock Exchange Symbol
This information is important if a company trades on more than one stock exchange. For example, Enbridge trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: ENB) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: ENB).
A Canadian investor would most likely want to buy the shares listed on the TSX, because buying on the NYSE means converting Canadian Dollars (CAD) to U.S. Dollars (USD), which in recent years has been disadvantageous to Canadians because of a weak Canadian Dollar (i.e., takes more CAD to purchase 1 USD), not to mention the fees associated with converting from CAD to USD.
There are some workarounds to ensure a CAD-USD conversion is executed in the investor’s favour, most notably Norbert’s Gambit, but this is beyond the scope of this article.
Stock Price and Change in Stock Price
Below the information of where the stock is being traded is the stock’s current price, and the currency in which it is being traded.
Note that the reported stock price may not be the stock price the moment you check. For example, you may check a stock price at 2:30 pm, but the most up-to-date stock price was reported at 2:25 pm.
Most news outlets report delayed stock prices, while others provide real-time quotes (RTQs). Getting real-time data is usually very resource-intensive for the outlet providing this information, so this is usually a premium service.
However, unless you are a day trader, this second-by-second change in stock price is usually of little importance to most investors, especially those who plan to hold a stock for the long term.
Right beside the stock price are the absolute and percent changes in price. These changes are with respect to the stock’s price at the end of the previous trading day.
Absolute means how much the stock’s price has changed in dollar terms (in the figure above, at that moment NVIDIA’s stock was down $3.01 with respect to yesterday’s closing price).
Percent difference simply reports the stock’s change in price as a percentage of the previous trading day’s price (in this case, the price at that moment was 0.56% less than yesterday’s final stock price).
Stock Table – Middle Section Analysis
Here, the stock’s price is reported over several different periods.
The period a stock table reports prices may differ among who created the table, but many usually include the stock price for the following periods:
- 1 day (the current trading day)
- YTD [Year-to-Date]
- Year-to-Date means changes in the stock’s price relative to the first trading day of the current year.
- 1 year (defined as 52 weeks ago)
- Max (the stock’s historical prices ever since it started trading on that exchange)
Remember that a stock may be traded on more than one exchange. If a stock is being traded on more than one exchange, an investor must ensure the stock price chart they are studying is for the exchange they plan to purchase the stock on.
Stock Table – Bottom Section Analysis
Near the bottom of most stock tables are a variety of ratios and metrics. We will go over each one reported here:
- Open: the price of the first transaction of that trading day.
- High: represents the stock’s highest price in a trading day.
- Low: is the stock’s lowest price in a trading day.
- Mkt cap (Market Capitalization): the number produced when a company’s stock price is multiplied by the number of total shares (common shares) currently outstanding (i.e. the number of shares currently available for trading). Market capitalization is commonly used as a measure of a company’s size in monetary terms.
- P/E ratio: for more on this ratio, please refer to this article.
- Div (dividend) yield: for more on this ratio, please refer to this article.
- Previous close: represents the final price paid for a stock in the previous trading day.
- 52 wk high: the highest price the stock has reached in the past 52 weeks (i.e., with respect to the same day one year ago)
- 52 wk low: the lowest price the stock has reached in the past 52 weeks.
Though not included in this stock table, the following are also usually reported:
- Bid: the price that an investor is willing to pay for a security. In economics terms, this can be thought of as a stock’s demand.
- Ask: the price that an investor is willing to sell a security for. In economics terms, this can be thought of as a stock’s supply.
- Volume: represents the total number of shares exchanged between buyers and sellers in a trading day.
Wrapping Up
A stock table is one of the most common tools investors use to make preliminary assessments of potential investments.
Though simple at a glance, stock tables provide investors with key bits of information they may take into consideration when performing preliminary investment analysis.
Taking the time to understand how to read a stock table could potentially help an investor screen potential investments a lot faster, thereby accelerating their analytical process.
