What does it really mean to buy a share?
I have been careful here to cover both shares in companies and in ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds). Some information such as around corporate actions and AGMs is only applicable for company shares and not ETFs. The shares that you own are registered to you through the broker that you bought them via but are verified by independent fund administrators and brokerage reconciliation processes. This means that there is independent verification that the broker has those shares and that they are ring fenced as being yours. The important point in this is that the broker cannot sell them for their own profit or otherwise use them for their own benefit, such as for collateral against margin etc..  1) Since the broker is keeping the shares for you they are still acting as an intermediary. In order to prove that you own the shares and have the right to sell them you need to transfer the registration to another broker in order to sell them through that broker. This typically, but not always, involves some kind of fee and the broker that you transfer to will need to be able to hold and deal in those shares. Not all brokers have access to all markets. 2) You can sell your shares through a different broker to the one you bought them through but you will need to transfer your ownership to the other broker and that broker will need to have access to that market. 3) You will normally, depending on your broker, get an email or other message on settlement which can be around two days after your purchase. You should also be able to see them in your online account UI before settlement. You usually don't get any messages from the issuing entity for the instrument until AGM time when you may get invited to the AGM if you hold enough stock. All other corporate actions should be handled for you by your broker. It is rare that settlement does not go through on well regulated markets, such as European, Hong Kong, Japanese, and US markets but this is more common on other markets. In particular I have seen quite a lot of trades reversed on the Istanbul market (XIST) recently. That is not to say that XIST is unsafe its just that I happen to have seen a few trades reversed recently. "Ditto to MD-Tech, but from a more ""philosophical"" point of view: When you buy stock, you own it, just like you own a cell phone or a toaster or a pair of socks that you bought. The difference is that a share of stock means that you own a piece of a corporation. You can't physically take possession of it and put it in your garage, because if all the stock-holders did that, then all the company's assets would be scattered around all the stock-holder's garages and the company couldn't function. Like if you bought a 1/11 share in a football team, you couldn't take one of the football players home and keep him in your closet, because then the team wouldn't be able to function. (I might want to take one of the cheerleaders home, but that's another subject ...) In pre-electronic times, you could get a piece of paper that said, ""XYZ Corporation - 1 share"". You could take physical possession of this piece of paper and put it in your filing cabinet. I'm not sure if you can even get such certificates any more; I haven't seen one in decades. These days it's just recorded electronically. That doesn't mean that you don't own it. It just means that someone else is keeping the records for you. It's like leaving your car in a parking lot. It's still your car. The people who run the parking lot doesn't own it. They are keeping it for you, but just because they have physical possession doesn't make it theirs."
It's great that you have gotten the itch to learn about the stock market.  There are a couple of fundamentals to understand first though. Company A has strong, growing, net earnings and minimal debt, it's trading for $100 per share.  Company B has good revenue but high costs of goods and total liabilities well in excess of total assets, it's trading for $0.10 per share.  There is no benefit to getting 10,000 shares or 10 shares for your $1,000.  Your goal is to invest in companies that have valuable products and services run by competent management teams.  Sure, the number of shares you own will dictate what percentage of the company you own, and in a number of cases, your voting power.  But even a penny stock will have a market capitalization of several million dollars so voting power isn't really a concern for your $1,000 investment.   There is a lot more in the three basic financial statements (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Statement of Cash Flows) than revenue.  Seasoned accountants can have a hard time parsing out where money is coming from and where it's going. In general there are obvious red flags, like a fast declining cash balance against a fast growing liabilities balance or expenses exceeding revenue.  While some of these things are common among new and high growth companies, it's not the place for a new investor with a small bankroll. A micro-cap company (penny stocks are in this group) will receive rounds of financing via issuing preferred convertible shares which may include options on more shares.  For a company worth $20mm a $5mm financing round can materially change the finances of a company, and will likely dilute your holdings in common stock.  Small growth companies need new financing frequently to fund their growth strategies. Revenue went up, great... why?  Did you open another store?  Did you open another sales office?  Did the revenue increase this quarter based on substantially the same operation that existed last quarter or have you increased the capacity of your operation?  If you increased the capacity of your operation what was the cost of the increase and did revenue increase as expected?  Can you expect revenue to continue to grow at this rate or was it a one time windfall from an unusual order? Sure, there are spectacular gains to be had in penny stocks.  XYZ Pharma Research (or whatever) goes from $0.05 to $0.60 and you've turned your $1,000 in to $12,000.  This is a really unlikely event...  Buying penny stocks is akin to buying lottery tickets.  Unless you are a high ranking employee at the company capable of making decisions, or one of the investors buying the preferred shares mentioned in point 3, or are one of the insiders of a pump and dump scam on the stock, penny common stocks are not a place to invest.  One could argue that even a company insider should probably avoid buying common stock. Just to illustrate the points above, you mention: Doing some really heavy research into this stock has made me question the whole penny stock market. Based on your research what is the enterprise value of the company? What were the gross proceeds of the last financing round, how many shares were issued and were there any warrants attached? What do you perceive to be heavy research?  What background do you have in finance/accounting to give weight to your ability to perform such research? Crawl. Walk. Then run. Don't kid yourself in to thinking that since you have some level of education you understand the contracts involved in enterprise finance. "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." When a stock is ask for 15.2 and bid for 14.5, and the last market price was 14.5, what does it mean? It means that the seller wants to sell for a higher price than the last sale while the buyer does not want to buy for more than the last sale price. Or what if the last price is 15.2? The seller is offering to sell for the last sale price, but the buyer wants to buy for less. The answer depends on whether the company involved has 'limited liability'. Most, but not all public and listed companies and corporations have this, but not all so it is worth checking and understanding what you are getting involved with.   The expression 'limited liability' means that the owners (shareholders) of a company have a liability up to the amount of the face value of the shares they hold which they have not yet paid for. The difference is usually minor but basically it means that if you buy $10 of shares you have no liability, but if the company gives you $10 of shares, and you pay them (in cash or kind) $5, then you still have a liability of $5. If the company fails, the debtors can come after you for that liability.  An 'unlimited liability' company is a different animal altogether. Lloyds insurance is probably the most famous example. Lloyds worked by putting together consortiums to underwrite risk. If the risk doesn't happen, the consortium keeps the premiums, if it does, they cover the loss. Most of the time they are very profitable but not always. For example, the consortiums which covered asbestos caused the bankruptcies of a great many very wealthy people. A lot of these answers are strong, but at the end of the day this question really boils down to: Do you want to own things? Duh, yes. It means you have: By this logic, you would expect aggregate stock prices to increase indefinitely.   Whether the price you pay for that ownership claim is worth it at any given point in time is a completely different question entirely. "Thanks for your reply. I think a lot of people are confused when talking about ownership, and I think it is a definitional issue.   When a company issues stock (the first time or anytime), what they are doing is ""selling"" the right to a percentage of the dividend. They are not actually selling parts of the company to you. Everyone thinks this way though, and that has to do with the Chicago School economists who perpetuated their ideas of ownership which is what everyone know thinks is the case. This way of thinking about corporations and ownership is just wrong (not ethically), just erroneous.   As I stated before, Lynn Stout of Cornell University explains this really well. I would encourage anyone to read more about it." When you own a share, you also own a vote (in most cases). That vote is your means of controlling the assets and management of the company. If you had enough votes and wanted to trade a share for an iPhone or liquidate the company entirely, you could do it. The only thing that prevents you from doing that is that companies are not set up to handle the transaction that way. Stock holders are usually trying to buy investments, not iPhones. There are companies that have more cash in the bank than the market cap (total value) of their stock. They usually don't remain as public companies for long in that case. An investor or group of investors buy them up and split the cash. If you had enough shares of Apple, you could do that to; or, just trade one for an iPhone. "Each company has X shares valued at $Y/share. When deals like ""Dragon's Den"" in Canada and Britain or ""Shark Tank"" in the US are done, this is where the company is issuing shares valued at $z total to the investor so that the company has the funds to do whatever it was that they came to the show to get funding to do, though some deals may be loans or royalties instead of equity in the company. The total value of the shares may include intangible assets of course but part of the point is that the company is doing an ""equity financing"" where the company continues to operate. The shareholders of the company have their stake which may be rewarded when the company is acquired or starts paying dividends but that is a call for the management of the company to make. While there is a cash infusion into the company, usually there is more being done as the Dragon or Shark can also bring contacts and expertise to the company to help it grow. If the investor provides the entrepreneur with introductions or offers suggestions on corporate strategy this is more than just buying shares in the company. If you look at the updates that exist on ""Dragon's Den"" or ""Shark Tank"" at least in North America I've seen, you will see how there are more than a few non-monetary contributions that the Dragon or Shark can provide."