How can I find if I can buy shares of a specific company?
"A company whose stock is available for sale to the public is called a publicly-held or publicly-traded company.  A public company's stock is sold on a stock exchange, and anyone with money can buy shares through a stock broker. This contrasts with a privately-held company, in which the shares are not traded on a stock exchange. In order to invest in a private company, you would need to talk directly to the current owners of the company. Finding out if a company is public or private is fairly easy.  One way to check this is to look at the Wikipedia page for the company.  For example, if you take a look at the Apple page, on the right sidebar you'll see ""Type: Public"", followed by the stock exchange ticker symbol ""AAPL"".  Compare this to the page for Mars, Inc.; on that page, you'll see ""Type: Private"", and no stock ticker symbol listed. Another way to tell: If you can find a quote for a share price on a financial site (such as Google Finance or Yahoo Finance), you can buy the stock.  You won't find a stock price for Mars, Inc. anywhere, because the stock is not publicly traded." "Hmm... Well there are several ways to do that: Go to any bank (or at the very least major ones). They can assist you with buying and/or selling stocks/shares of any company on the financial market. They keep your shares safe at the bank and take care of them. The downside is that they will calculate fees for every single thing they do with your money or shares or whatever. Go to any Financial broker/trader that deals with the stock market. Open an account and tell them to buy shares from company ""X"" and keep them. Meaning they won't trade with them if this is what you want. Do the same as point 2, but on your own. Find a suitable broker with decent transaction fees, open an account, find the company's stock code and purchase the stocks via the platform the broker uses."
It depends on the timing of the events. Sometimes the buying company announces their intention but the other company doesn't like the deal. It can go back and forth several times, before the deal is finalized. The specifics of the deal determine what happens to the stock: The deal will specify when the cutoff is. Some people want the cash, others want the shares.  Some will speculate once the initial offer is announced where the final offer (if there is one) will end up. This can cause a spike in volume, and the price could go up or down. Regarding this particular deal I did find the following: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/expedia-to-acquire-orbitz-worldwide-for-12-per-share-in-cash-300035187.html Additional Information and Where to Find It Orbitz intends to file with the SEC a proxy statement as well as other   relevant documents in connection with the proposed transaction with   Expedia. The definitive proxy statement will be sent or given to the   stockholders of Orbitz and will contain important information about   the proposed transaction and related matters. SECURITY HOLDERS ARE   URGED TO READ THE PROXY STATEMENT CAREFULLY WHEN IT BECOMES AVAILABLE   AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS FILED WITH THE SEC, AS WELL AS ANY   AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS TO THOSE DOCUMENTS, BECAUSE THEY WILL   CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. The proxy statement and other relevant   materials (when they become available), and any other documents filed   by Expedia or Orbitz with the SEC, may be obtained free of charge at   the SEC's website, at www.sec.gov. In addition, security holders will   be able to obtain free copies of the proxy statement from Orbitz by   contacting Investor Relations by mail at ATTN: Corporate Secretary,   Orbitz Worldwide, Inc., 500 W. Madison Street, Suite 1000, Chicago,   Illinois 60661. "I'd suggest you start by looking at the mutual fund and/or ETF options available via your bank, and see if they have any low-cost funds that invest in high-risk sectors.  You can increase your risk (and potential returns) by allocating your assets to riskier sectors rather than by picking individual stocks, and you'll be less likely to make an avoidable mistake. It is possible to do as you suggest and pick individual stocks, but by doing so you may be taking on more risk than you suspect, even unnecessary risk.  For instance, if you decide to buy stock in Company A, you know you're taking a risk by investing in just one company.  However, without a lot of work and financial expertise, you may not be able to assess how much risk you're taking by investing in Company A specifically, as opposed to Company B.  Even if you know that investing in individual stocks is risky, it can be very hard to know how risky those particular individual stocks are, compared to other alternatives. This is doubly true if the investment involves actions more exotic than simply buying and holding an asset like a stock.  For instance, you could definitely get plenty of risk by investing in commercial real estate development or complicated options contracts; but a certain amount of work and expertise is required to even understand how to do that, and there is a greater likelihood that you will slip up and make a costly mistake that negates any extra gain, even if the investment itself might have been sound for someone with experience in that area.  In other words, you want your risk to really be the risk of the investment, not the ""personal"" risk that you'll make a mistake in a complicated scheme and lose money because you didn't know what you were doing.  (If you do have some expertise in more exotic investments, then maybe you could go this route, but I think most people -- including me -- don't.) On the other hand, you can find mutual funds or ETFs that invest in large economic sectors that are high-risk, but because the investment is diversified within that sector, you need only compare the risk of the sectors.  For instance, emerging markets are usually considered one of the highest-risk sectors.  But if you restrict your choice to low-cost emerging-market index funds, they are unlikely to differ drastically in risk (at any rate, far less than individual companies).  This eliminates the problem mentioned above: when you choose to invest in Emerging Markets Index Fund A, you don't need to worry as much about whether Emerging Markets Index Fund B might have been less risky; most of the risk is in the choice to invest in the emerging markets sector in the first place, and differences between comparable funds in that sector are small by comparison.  You could do the same with other targeted sectors that can produce high returns; for instance, there are mutual funds and ETFs that invest specifically in technology stocks. So you could begin by exploring the mutual funds and ETFs available via your existing investment bank, or poke around on Morningstar.  Fees will still matter no matter what sector you're in, so pay attention to those.  But you can probably find a way to take an aggressive risk position without getting bogged down in the details of individual companies.  Also, this will be less work than trying something more exotic, so you're less likely to make a costly mistake due to not understanding the complexities of what you're investing in." number of shares is finite Yes it is I would assume that the repurchase numbers exceed the numbers of created shares Number of shares repurchased by company would never exceed in theory the total number of shares. It can become Zero, however its unlikely as it would run on its own and its not possible. In practise company generally repurchase a small percentage say 5% - 10% of the outstanding shares. The number of shares additional created is irrelevant. Its the total shares that is relevant. Edit: A company starts with say 100 shares, over the period it creates new shares [via various mechanisms, Rights issue, split, Additional shares, etc] say to the extent of 50. So now the company has total shares of 150. This lets say is held by 15 entities. The company can buy back say 15 shares in a year, and keep doing this, next year another 10 etc. However a company if it purchased all 150 of its own shares is unlikely as the Majority shareholders will not like this to happen and loose control. There are 2 different things, buying out of minority shareholders, typically different percentage of the shares are held by non-promoters and available for trade can range from 10% to 70% ... there are also listing norms. Quite a few stock-exchange need atleast 10% shares to be available for trade [held by non-promotors]. In case a company has a small number of shares held by non-promoters, it can buy back the shares and delist the company from the exchange. "As @ApplePie pointed out in their answer, at any given time there is a finite amount of stock available in a company. One subtlety you may be missing is that there is always a price associated with an offer to buy shares. That is, you don't put in an order simply to buy 1 share of ABC, you put in an order to buy 1 share of ABC for $10. If no one is willing to sell a share of ABC for $10, then your order will go unfilled. This happens millions of times a day as traders try to figure the cheapest price they can get for a stock. Practically speaking, there is always a price at which people are willing to sell their shares. You can put in a market order for 1 share of ABC, which says essentially ""I want one share of ABC, and I will pay whatever the market deems to be the price"". Your broker will find you 1 share, but you may be very unhappy about the price you have to pay! While it's very rare for a market to have nobody willing to sell at any price, it occasionally happens that no one is willing to buy at any price. This causes a market crash, as in the 2007-2008 financial crisis, when suddenly everyone became very suspicious of how much debt the major banks actually held, and for a few days, very few traders were willing to buy bank stocks at any price." When you buy shares, you are literally buying a share of the company.  You become a part-owner of it. Companies are not required to pay dividends in any given year.  It's up to them to decide each year how much to pay out. The value of the shares goes up and down depending on how much the markets consider the company is worth.  If the company is successful, the price of the shares goes up.  If it's unsuccessful, the price goes down.  You have no control over that.  If the company fails completely and goes bankrupt, then the shares are worthless. Dilution is where the company decides to sell more shares.  If they are being sold at market value, then you haven't really lost anything.  But if they are sold below cost (perhaps as an incentive to certain staff), then the value of the company per share is now less.  So your shares may be worth a bit less than they were.  You would get to vote at the AGM on such schemes.  But unless you own a significant proportion of the shares in the company, your vote will probably make no difference. In practice, you can't protect yourself.  Buying shares is a gamble.  All you can do is decide what to gamble on. Yes, all the shares of a publicly traded company can be purchased. This effectively takes the company private so that it's no longer traded on a stock market. Here are some examples: EDIT: to answer your edited question... the corporation can issue more stock.  However that would dilute the value of existing shares.  Thus, existing shareholders must vote to allow more shares to be issued. So... in your situation yes, you'd need to wait for someone else to sell. No, there is no such list, as the other answers mention it is practically impossible to compile one.  However you can see the institutional investors of a public company.  MSN Money has this information available in a fair amount of details.  For example see the Institutional Investors of GOOG It seems like you want to compare the company's values not necessarily the stock price.  Why not get the total outstanding shares and the stock price, generate the market cap.  Then you could compare changes to market cap rather than just share price.