Why did my number of shares of stock decrease?
During a stock split the only thing that changes is the number of shares outstanding.  Typically a stock splits to lower its price per share.  Sometimes if a company's value is falling it will do a reverse split where X shares will be exchanged for Y shares.  This is typically done to avoid being de-listed from an exchange if the price per share falls below a certain threshold, usually $1.  Again the only thing changing is the number of shares outstanding.  A 20 for 1 reverse split means for every 20 shares outstanding the shareholder will be granted one new share. Example X Co. has 1,000,000 shares outstanding for a price of $100 per share.  It does a 1 for 10 split.  Now there are 10,000,000 shares outstanding for a price of $10 per share. Example Y Co has 1,000,000 shares outstanding for a price of $1 per share.  It does a 10 for 1 reverse split.  Now there are 100,000 shares outstanding for a price of $10. Quickly looking at the news for ASTI it looks like it underwent a 20 for 1 reverse split.  You should probably look at your statements and ask your broker how the arithmetic worked in your case. Investopedia links for Reverse Stock Split and Stock Split
"This could be another reason.  ""Companies buy their own stock in the market place to reduce the number of shares outstanding, and thus boosts the earnings per share. It also boosts the stock price, which benefits management that has stock options. "" Taken from this article. http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2014/01/06/the-most-reliable-indicator-of-an-approaching-market-top/ and this article ""Why are stock rising?"" may help as well.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2013/12/23/why-are-stocks-rising/" "The answer is partly and sometimes, but you cannot know when or how. Most clearly, you do not take somebody else's money if you buy shares in a start-up company. You are putting your money at risk in exchange for a share in the rewards. Later, if the company thrives, you can sell your shares for whatever somebody else will pay for your current share in the thriving company's earnings. Or, you lose your money, when the company fails. (Much of it has then ended up in the company's employees' pockets, much of the rest with the government as taxes that the company paid).  If the stockmarket did not exist, people would be far less willing to put their money into a new company, because selling shares would be far harder. This in turn would mean that fewer new things were tried out, and less progress would be made. Communists insist that central state planning would make better decisions than random people linked by a market. I suggest that the historical record proves otherwise. Historically, limited liability companies came first, then dividing them up into larger numbers of ""bearer"" shares, and finally creating markets where such shares were traded.  On the other hand if you trade in the short or medium term, you are betting that your opinion that XYZ shares are undervalued against other investors who think otherwise. But there again, you may be buying from a person who has some other reason for selling. Maybe he just needs some cash for a new car or his child's marriage, and will buy back into XYZ once he has earned some more money.  You can't tell who you are buying from, and the seller can only tell if his decision to sell was good with the benefit of a good few years of hindsight.  I bought shares hand over fist immediately after the Brexit vote. I was putting my money where my vote went, and I've now made a decent profit. I don't feel that I harmed the people who sold out in expectation of the UK economy cratering. They got the peace of mind of cash (which they might then reinvest in Euro stocks or gold or whatever). Time will tell whether my selling out of these purchases more recently was a good decision (short term, not my best, but a profit is a profit ...)  I never trade using borrowed money and I'm not sure whether city institutions should be allowed to do so (or more reasonably, to what extent this should be allowed). In a certain size and shortness of holding time, they cease to contribute to an orderly market and become a destabilizing force. This showed up in the financial crisis when certain banks were ""too big to fail"" and had to be bailed out at the taxpayer's expense. ""Heads we win, tails you lose"", rather than trading with us small guys as equals! Likewise it's hard to see any justification for high-frequency trading, where stocks are held for mere milliseconds, and the speed of light between the trader's and the market's computers is significant." Greetings r/finance!! I have a question regarding EBIT and the company that I work for.   The steel company I work for reported they made a profit of $1.3 billion profit. Here's the link with some more numbers:  http://www.nwitimes.com/business/local/arcelormittal-turns-billion-profit-in-second-quarter/article_606a0989-066f-5140-864d-2b04e5f4f294.html  Now I am a union worker and like everyone else in my union, we get a profit sharing check based on the company's profit and with the labor agreement we have with them we get a 7.5% cut of it.   So my question for you guys why did we recieve this piece of paper today?  https://imgur.com/gallery/pSIG3  Why is there still a $33 million dollar loss that we don't get any profit sharing?? Any and all answers or information is appreciated. Thank you for your time in advance! 1) What's the point of paying a dividend if the stock price   automatically decreases? Don't the shareholders just break even? When the company earns cash beyond what is needed for expenses, the value of the firm increases. As a shareholder, you own a piece of that increased value as soon as the company earns it. When the dividend is paid, the value of the firm decreases, but you break even on the dividend transaction. The benefit to you in holding the company's shares is the continually increasing value, whether paid out to you, or retained. Be careful not to confuse the value of the firm with the stock price. The stock price is ever-changing, in the short-term driven mostly by investor emotion. Over the long term, by far the largest effect on stock price is earnings. Take an extreme, and simplistic example. The company never grows or shrinks, earnings are always the same, there is no inflation :) , and they pay everything out in dividends. By the reasoning above, the firm value never changes, so over the long-term the stock price will never change, but you still get your quarterly dividends. An index will drop a company for several reasons:  A fund decides how close they want to mirror the index. Some do so exactly, others only approximate the index. "Thanks for pointing out [the study](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1748851). It's a slightly different cause than what I was describing when I posted this. Specifically, they show an effect not when the names get confused, but rather when the name similarity simply brings more attention to the stock. I was surprised nobody mentioned that in response to my post.  But also interesting is that they had to control for simple confusion between stock symbols, which implies that ticker confusion has a known effect. So I dug into research on that and quickly found [this study](http://www.efmaefm.org/0EFMAMEETINGS/EFMA%20ANNUAL%20MEETINGS/2010-Aarhus/EFMA2010_0161_fullpaper.pdf) found ""a high positive correlation between returns on two matching stocks with similar ticker symbols""." This is to protect your position in specific highly volatile market conditions.  If the stock is free falling and you only have a stop order at $90, it's possible that this order could be filled at $50 or even less. The limit is to protect you from that, as there are certain very specific times where it's better to just hold the stock instead of taking a huge loss (ie when price is whipsawing). "Companies normally do not give you X% of shares, but in effect give you a fixed ""N"" number of shares. The ""N"" may translate initially to X%, but this can go down. If say we began with 100 shares, A holding 50 shares and B holding 50 shares. As the startup grows, there is need for more money. Create 50 more shares and sell it at an arranged price to investor C. Now the percentage of each investor is 33.33%. The money that comes in will go to the company and not to A & B.   From here on, A & C together can decide to slowly cut out B by, for example: After any of the above the % of shares held by B would definitely go down."