How do I get stock quotes?

A stock quote is a list of prices for a stock at a particular point during the trading day. It includes the price of any specific stock at which a person is willing to buy or sell a certain number of shares. They are expressed in decimals and generally include a bid, an ask, and a last.

The bid or ask quotes are the most current prices and quantities at which the shares can be bought or sold. The bid quote shows the price and quantity at which a current buyer is willing to purchase the shares and the ask shows what a current seller is offering or is willing to sell the shares for. The last is the last price at which a security or commodity traded, meaning the most recent price on which a buyer and seller agreed and at which some amount of the asset was transacted. This is also known as an asset's quoted price.

Potential investors or sellers in a company are more concerned about the bid and ask quotes since they reflect at what prices the stock can be bought or sold, while the price quote shows the price at which the stock traded most recently.

Quotes for stock and bond prices change throughout the trading day as new transactions occur one after another in a continual stream of trades. When you look up a stock quote for a given company, you are looking at the most recent price at which a trade was successfully executed for that particular security. Stock quotes are expressed in either real-time or 15 minute delay.

There are many different ways to access stock quotes. One way to get them is to download what is known in the U.S. stock market as stock ticker. A stock ticker is a software program that can often be downloaded free of charge off of the Internet. It allows you to see the changes the stock market is experiencing at any given time by displaying stock or ticker symbols as well as their latest value. A stock symbol or ticker symbol is a mnemonic used to uniquely identify shares of a publicly-traded corporation on a particular stock market. A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both.

Another way to access stock quotes is to view them on the television. There are several channels that offer computer simulations of tickers, usually on the lower part of the TV screen. These tickers are sponsored by companies like United Technologies or Charles Schwab so commercial ads from those companies show up every once in a while. These stock quotes use stock symbols that are unique identifiers assigned to each security traded on the market. Every company has a unique ticker symbol which designates who they are in any particular market such Reuters, the NYSE, the NASDAQ or the American Stock Exchange.

No matter which type of ticker you use, that is where most investors access stock quote information. Tickers generally provide several different types of information. The will often have a market summary as well as a commodity summary. You may also find stock quotes of stocks that are experiencing high trading volumes as well as stocks trading on different markets. If using your own ticker you will be able to customize it to display only those stocks that you hold an interest in. If you are an investor, it doesn't matter where you go to access the information, it just matters that you do.