How To Interpret Share Prices?
The missing information is at the end of the first line: the price is from NASDAQ (most specifically Nasdaq Global Select), which is a stock exchange in the USA, so the price is in US Dollars.
"To add to @keshlam's answer slightly a stock's price is made up of several components: the only one of these that is known even remotely accurately at any time is the book value on the day that the accounts are prepared. Even  completed cashflows after the books have been prepared contain some slight unknowns as they may be reversed if stock is returned, for example, or reduced by unforeseen costs.  Future cashflows are based on (amongst other things) how many sales you expect to make in the future for all time. Exercise for the reader: how many iPhone 22s will apple sell in 2029? Even known future cashflows have some risk attached to them; customers may not pay for goods, a supplier may go into liquidation and so need to change its invoicing strategy etc.. Estimating the risk on future cashflows is highly subjective and depends greatly on what the analyst expects the exact economic state of the world will be in the future. Investors have the choice of investing in a risk free instrument (this is usually taken as being modelled by the 10 year US treasury bond) that is guaranteed to give them a return. To invest in anything riskier than the risk free instrument they must be paid a premium over the risk free return that they would get from that. The risk premium is related to how likely they think it is that they will not receive a return higher than that rate. Calculation of that premium is highly subjective; if I know the management of the company well I will be inclined to think that the investment is far less risky (or perhaps riskier...) than someone who does not, for example. Since none of the factors that go into a share price are accurately measurable and many are subjective there is no ""right"" share price at any time, let alone at time of IPO. Each investor will estimate these values differently and so value the shares differently and their trading, based on their ever changing estimates, will move the share price to an indeterminable level. In comments to @keshlam's answer you ask if there is enough information to work out the share price if a company buys out the company before IPO. Dividing the price that this other company paid by the relative ownership structure of the firm would give you an idea of what that company thought that the company was worth at that moment in time and can be used as a surrogate for market price but it will not and cannot accurately represent the market price as other investors will value the firm differently by estimating the criteria above differently and so will move the share price based on their valuation." "No, the stock market is not there for speculation on corporate memorabilia.  At its base, it is there for investing in a business, the point of the investment being, of course, to make money.  A (successful) business earns money, and that makes it valuable to its owners since that money can be distributed to them.  Shares of stock are pieces of business ownership, and so are valuable.   If you knew that the business would have profit of $10,000,000 every year, and would distribute that to the owners of each of its 10,000,000 shares each year, you would know to that each share would receive $1 each year.  How much would such a share be worth to you?  If you could instead put money in a bank and get 5% a year back, to get $1 a year back you would have to put $20 into the bank.  So maybe that share of stock is worth about $20 to you.  If somebody offers to sell you such a share for $18, you might buy it; for $23, maybe you pass up the offer. But business is uncertain, and how much profit the business will make is uncertain and will vary through time.  So how much is a share of a real business worth?  This is a much harder call, and people use many different ways to come up with how much they should pay for a share.  Some people probably just think something like ""Apple is a good company making money, I'll buy a share at whatever price it is being offered at right now.""  Others look at every number available, build models of the company and the economy and the risks, all to estimate what a share might be worth, more or less.  There is no indisputable value for a share of a successful business. So, what effect does a company's earnings have on the price of its stock?  You can only say that for some of the people who might buy or sell shares, higher earnings will, all other thing being equal, have them be willing to spend more to buy it or demand more when selling it.  But how much more is not quantifiable but depends on each person's approach to the problem.  Higher earnings would tend to raise the price of the stock.  Yet there are other factors, such as people who had expected even higher earnings, whose actions would tend to lower the price, and people who are OK with the earnings now, but suspect trouble for the business is appearing on the horizon, whose actions would also tend to lower the price. This is why people say that a stock's price is determined by supply and demand." My interpretation of that sentence is that you can't do the buying/selling of shares outright (sans margin) because of the massive quantity of shares he's talking about.  So you have to use margin to buy the stocks. However, because in order to make significant money with this sort of strategy you probably need to be working dozens of stocks at the same time, you need to be familiar with portfolio margin.  Since your broker does not calculate margin calls based on individual stocks, but rather on the value of your whole portfolio, you should have experience handling margin not just on individual stock movements but also on overall portfolio movements. For example, if 10% (by value) of the stocks you're targeting tend to have a correlation of -0.8 with the price of oil you should probably target another 10% (by value) in stocks that tend to have a correlation of +0.8 with the price of oil.  And so on and so forth.  That way your portfolio can weather big (or even small) changes in market conditions that would cause a margin call on a novice investor's portfolio. "This question and your other one indicate you're a bit unclear on how capital gains taxes work, so here's the deal: you buy an asset (like shares of stock or a mutual fund).  You later sell it for more than you bought it for.  You pay taxes on your profit: the difference between what you sold it for and what you bought it for.  What matters is not the amount of money you ""withdraw"", but the prices at which assets are bought and sold. In fact, often you will be able to choose which individual shares you sell, which means you have some control over the tax you pay.  For a simple example, suppose you buy 10 shares of stock for $100 each in January (an investment of $1000); we'll call these the ""early"" shares.  The stock goes up to $200 in July, and you buy 10 more shares (investing an additional $2000); we'll call these the ""late"" shares.  Then the stock drops to $150.  Suppose you want $1500 in cash, so you are going to sell 10 shares. The 10 early shares you bought have increased in value, because you bought then for $100 but can now sell them for $150.  The 10 late shares have decreased in value, because you bought them for $200 but can now only sell them for $150.  If you choose to sell the early shares, you will have a capital gain of $500 ($1500 sale price minus $1000 purchase price), on which you may owe taxes.  If you sell the late shares, you will have a capital loss of $500 ($1500 sale price minus $2000 purchase price is -$500), which you can potentially use to reduce your taxes.  Or you could sell 5 of each and have no gain or loss (selling five early shares for $150 gives you a gain of $250, but selling five late shares for $150 gives you a loss of $250, and they cancel out). The point of all this is to say that the tax is not determined by the amount of cash you get, but by the difference between the sale price and the price you purchased for (known as the ""cost basis""), and this in turn depends on which specific assets you sell.  It is not enough to know the total amount you invested and the total gain.  You need to know the specific cost basis (i.e., original purchase price) of the specific shares you're selling.  (This is also the answer to your question about long-term versus short-term gains.  It doesn't matter how much money you make on the sale.  What matters is how long you hold the asset before selling it.) That said, many brokers will automatically sell your shares in a certain order unless you tell them otherwise (and some won't let you tell them otherwise).  Often they will use the ""first in, first out"" rule, which means they will always sell the earliest-purchased shares first. To finally get to your specific question about Betterment, they have a page here that says they use a different method.  Essentially, they try to sell your shares in a way that minimizes taxes.  They do this by first selling shares that have a loss, and only then selling shares that have a gain.  This basically means that if you want to cash out $X, and it is possible to do it in a way that incurs no tax liability, they will do that. What gets me very confused is if I continue to invest random amounts of money each month using Betterment, then I need to withdraw some cash, what are the tax implications.  As my long answer above should indicate, there is no simple answer to this.  The answer is ""it depends"".  It depends on exactly when you bought the shares, exactly how much you paid for them, exactly when and how much the price rose or fell, and exactly how much you sell them for.  Betterment is more or less saying ""Don't worry about any of this, trust us, we will handle everything so that your tax is minimized."" A final note: if you really do want to track the details of your cost basis, Betterment may not be for you, because it is an automated platform that may do a lot of individual trades that a human wouldn't do, and that can make tracking the cost basis yourself very difficult.  Almost the whole point of something like Betterment is that you are supposed to give them your money and forget about these details." It looks more like someone is trying to pocket the spread.  The trades are going off at the bid then the ask (from what I can tell without any L1 and L2 data, but the spread could be bigger than what the prices show, since the stock looks pretty volatile given the difference between current price and VWAP...).  Looking through the JSE rule books I didn't find any special provisions on how they handle odd lots in their Central Order Book, but the usual practice in other markets is to display only round lot orders. So these 4 share orders would remain hidden from book participants and could be set there to trigger executions from those who are probing for limit orders. Or to make a market with very limited risk. You can have a pretty good guess by looking at price pattern and order flow (size of the trades) a) price should be traded in a range b) relatively large size orders, speed. To dig a little deeper, a number of analysts within (and without) Reuters are polled for their views on individual stocks and markets on buy-hold-sell. The individual analysts will be a varied bunch of fundamentalists, technical, quant and a mixture of the three plus more arcane methodologies. There may be various levels of rumors that aren't strong enough to be considered insider trading, but all of these will give an analyst an impression of the stock/market. Generally I think there isn't much value there, except from the point of view if you are a contrarian trader, then this will form a part of the input to your trading methodology. It is possible to figure out the next price. Just not for Joe Average. A stock exchange has a orderbook. This has two sides. One side has alle the buyers, how many shares they want, and what they are willing to pay. The other side has all the sellers, how many shares they got, and what price they are willing to accept. If any buyers and sellers match up, their orders are executed, money and shares are exchanged, everyone is happy. So the current asking price (the price you have to pay, to get some shares) is currently 12.46$. Let's say you want 6000 shares, for any price. The orderbook now looks like this: Your order is executed, you get 6000 shares for a total of 74,761$ (5900 * 12,46 + 100 * 12,47$). The order book now looks like this: The new asking price is 12.47$. Congrats, you knew the price in advance. Of course this is simplified, there are millions of entries on both sides, thousands of trades happen every millisecond and you'll have to pay the stock exchange a lot of money to give you all this information in real time.  That's what high frequency traders are doing. They use highly specialised computer systems to exploit differences in stock exchanges all over the world. It's called arbitage. They have to be faster than the other guy. This race has gone on for a few years now, so that the limiting factor starts to become the speed of light. YOU are not going to benefit, or else you would not be asking questions on PERSONAL finance :)