Why do some companies (like this company) have such a huge per share price?
"Simple answer is because the stocks don't split. Most stocks would have a similar high price per share if they didn't split occasionally.  Why don't they split? A better way to ask this is probably, why DO most stocks split? The standard answer is that it gives the appearance that stocks are ""cheap"" again and encourages investors to buy them. Some people, Warren Buffett (of Berkshire Hathaway) don't want any part of these shenanigans and refuse to split their stocks. Buffett also has commented that he thinks splitting a stock also adds unnecessary volatility."
"It's been said before, but to repeat succinctly, a company's current share price is no more or less than what ""the market"" thinks that share is worth, as measured by the price at which the shares are being bought and sold. As such, a lot of things can affect that price, some of them material, others ethereal. A common reason to own stock is to share the profits of the company; by owning 1 share out of 1 million shares outstanding, you are entitled to 1/1000000 of that company's quarterly profits (if any). These are paid out as dividends. Two key measurements are based on these dividend payments; the first is ""earnings per share"", which is the company's stated quarterly profits, divided by outstanding shares, with the second being the ""price-earnings ratio"" which is the current price of the stock divided by its EPS. Your expected ""yield"" on this stock is more or less the inverse of this number; if a company has a P/E ratio of 20, then all things being equal, if you invest $100 in this stock you can expect a return of $5, or 5% (1/20). As such, changes in the expected earnings per share can cause the share price to rise or fall to maintain a P/E ratio that the pool of buyers are willing to tolerate. News that a company might miss its profit expectations, due to a decrease in consumer demand, an increase in raw materials costs, labor, financing, or any of a multitude of things that industry analysts watch, can cause the stock price to drop sharply as people look for better investments with higher yields. However, a large P/E ratio is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a large stable company. That stability means the company is better able to weather economic problems, and thus it is a lower risk. Now, not all companies issue dividends. Apple is probably the most well-known example. The company simply retains all its earnings to reinvest in itself. This is typically the strategy of a smaller start-up; whether they're making good money or not, they typically want to keep what they make so they can keep growing, and the shareholders are usually fine with that. Why? Well, because there's more than one way to value a company, and more than one way to look at a stock. Owning one share of a stock can be seen quite literally as owning a share of that company. The share can then be valued as a fraction of the company's total assets.  Sounds simple, but it isn't, because not every asset the company owns has a line in the financial statements. A company's brand name, for instance, has no tangible value, and yet it is probably the most valuable single thing Apple owns. Similarly, intellectual property doesn't have a ""book value"" on a company's balance sheet, but again, these are huge contributors to the success and profitability of a company like Apple; the company is viewed as a center of innovation, and if it were not doing any innovating, it would very quickly be seen as a middleman for some other company's ideas and products. A company can't sustain that position for long even if it's raking in the money in the meantime. Overall, the value of a company is generally a combination of these two things; by owning a portion of stock, you own a piece of the company's assets, and also claim a piece of their profits. A large company with a lot of material assets and very little debt can be highly valued based solely on the sum of its parts, even if profits are lagging. Conversely, a company more or less operating out of a storage unit can have a patent on the cure for cancer, and be shoveling money into their coffers with bulldozers." "You are probably going to hate my answer, but... If there was an easy way to ID stocks like FB that were going to do what FB did, then those stocks wouldn't exist and do that because they would be priced higher at the IPO. The fact is there is always some doubt, no one knows the future, and sometimes value only becomes clear with time. Everyone wants to buy a stock before it rises right? It will only be worth a rise if it makes more profit though, and once it is established as making more profit the price will be already up, because why wouldn't it be? That means to buy a real winner you have to buy before it is completely obvious to everyone that it is going to make more profit in the future, and that means stock prices trade at speculative prices, based on expected future performance, not current or past performance. Now I'm not saying past and future performance has nothing in common, but there is a reason that a thousand financially oriented websites quote a disclaimer like ""past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance"". Now maybe this is sort of obvious, but looking at your image, excluding things like market capital that you've not restricted, the PE ratio is based on CURRENT price and PAST earnings, the dividend yield is based on PAST publications of what the dividend will be and CURRENT price, the price to book is based on PAST publication of the company balance sheet and CURRENT price, the EPS is based on PAST earnings and the published number of shares, and the ROI and net profit margin in based on published PAST profits and earnings and costs and number of shares. So it must be understood that every criteria chosen is PAST data that analysts have been looking at for a lot longer than you have with a lot more additional information and experience with it. The only information that is even CURRENT is the price. Thus, my ultimate conclusive point is, you can't based your stock picks on criteria like this because it's based on past information and current stock price, and the current stock price is based on the markets opinion of relative future performance. The only way to make a good stock pick is understand the business, understand its market, and possibly understand world economics as it pertains to that market and business. You can use various criteria as an initial filter to find companies and investigate them, but which criteria you use is entirely your preference. You might invest only in profitable companies (ones that make money and probably pay regular dividends), thus excluding something like an oil exploration company, which will just lose money, and lose it, and lose some more, forever... unless it hits the jackpot, in which case you might suddenly find yourself sitting on a huge profit. It's a question of risk and preference. Regarding your concern for false data. Google defines the Return on investment (TTM) (%) as: Trailing twelve month Income after taxes divided by the average (Total Long-Term Debt + Long-Term Liabilities + Shareholders Equity), expressed as a percentage. If you really think they have it wrong you could contact them, but it's probably correct for whatever past data or last annual financial results it's based on." Here is an example for you. We have a fictional company. It's called MoneyCorp. Its job is to own money, and that's all. Right now it owns $10,000. It doesn't do anything special with that $10,000 - it stores it in a bank account, and whenever it earns interest gives it to the shareholders as a dividend. Also, it doesn't have any expenses at all, and doesn't pay taxes, and is otherwise magic so that it doesn't have to worry about distractions from its mathematical perfection. There are 10,000 shares of MoneyCorp, each worth exactly $1. However, they may trade for more or less than $1 on the stock market, because it's a free market and people trading stock on the stock market can trade at whatever price two people agree on. Scenario 1. MoneyCorp wants to expand. They sell 90,000 shares for $1 each. The money goes in the same bank account at the same interest rate. Do the original shareholders see a change? No. 100,000 shares, $100,000, still $1/share. No problem. This is the ideal situation. Scenario 2: MoneyCorp sells 90,000 shares for less than the current price, $0.50 each. Do the original shareholders lose out? YES. It now has something like $55,000 and 100,000 shares. Each share is now worth $0.55. The company has given away valuable equity to new shareholders. That's bad. Why didn't they get more money from those guys? Scenario 3: MoneyCorp sells 90,000 shares for more than the current price, $2 each, because there's a lot of hype about its business. MoneyCorp now owns $190,000 in 100,000 shares and each share is worth $1.90. Existing shareholders win big! This is why a company would like to make its share offering at the highest price possible (think, Facebook IPO). Of course, the new shareholders may be disappointed. MoneyCorp is actually a lot like a real business! Actually, if you want to get down to it, MoneyCorp works very much like a money-market fund. The main difference between MoneyCorp and a random company on the stock market is that we know exactly how much money MoneyCorp is worth. You don't know that with a real business: sales may grow, sales may drop, input prices may rise and fall, and there's room for disagreement - that's why stock markets are as unpredictable as they are, so there's room for doubt when a company sells their stock at a price existing shareholders think is too cheap (or buys it at a price that is too expensive). Most companies raising capital will end up doing something close to scenario 1, the fair-prices-for-everyone scenario. Legally, if you own part of a company and they do something a Scenario-2 on you... you may be out of luck. Consider also: the other owners are probably hurt as much as you are. Only the new shareholders win. And unless the management approving the deal is somehow giving themselves a sweetheart deal, it'll be hard to demonstrate any malfeasance. As an individual, you probably won't file a lawsuit either, unless you own a very large stake in the company. Lawsuits are expensive. A big institutional investor or activist investor of some sort may file a suit if millions of dollars are at stake, but it'll be ugly at best. If there's nothing evil going on with the management, this is just one way that a company loses money from bad management. It's probably not the most important one to worry about. The price to earnings ratio is a measure of the company's current share price compared to the annual net earnings per share.  The other way to think about this is the number of years a company would take to pay back the share price if the earnings stay constant.  This ignores factors like inflation and can be used as an indicator of risk.  During the internet bubble many companies had P/E above 24 and no possible means of earning back the share prices that were inflated largely due to speculation. Most tools like Google Finance will list the P/E for a particular quote. Stock prices are set by the market - supply and demand. See Apple for example, which is exactly the company you described: tons of earnings, zero dividends. The stock price goes up and down depending on what happens with the company and how investors feel about it, and it can happen that the total value of the outstanding stock shares will be less than the value of the underlying assets of the company (including the cash resulted from the retained earnings). It can happen, also, that if the investors feel that the stock is not going to appreciate significantly, they will vote to distribute dividends. Its not the company's decision, its the board's. The board is appointed by the shareholders, which is exactly why the voting rights are important. So many possible reasons here, some good, some not.   - Maybe they weren't as good at negotiating the original equity ask.   - Maybe they don't let egos get in the way of advice from a business partner.   - Maybe is about goals.  - Maybe it's random luck with a small sample size.  - Maybe it's selection bias.  - Maybe they're seeling a popular feminism trend more than a product.  Regardless, without more data and comparables, this is just fluff. Amazon is stuffed full of dumb money.  People who like the company and therefore assume it must be a good investment.  Nothing about an investment makes sense when the PE is 100.  If you buy something like that you must assume 8% moves will happen pretty frequently. As said by others, buying shares of a company will not support it directly. But let's think about two example companies: Company A, which has 90 % stocks owned by supporters, and Company B, which has only 1 % of stocks owned by supporters. Both companies release bad news, for example profits have decreased. In Company B, most investors might want to sell their stock quickly and the price will plummet. In Company A, the supporters continue believing in the company and will not want to sell it. The price will drop less (usually, but it can drop even more if the sellers of Company A are very desperate to get rid of the stock). So, why is it important for the company to have a high stock price? In the short-term, it's not important. One example is that the company can release more stocks and receive more financing by doing that. Other reasons are listed here: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/020703.asp