How do I get the latest or even realtime information of institutions stock buy/sell action?
Of course not, this is confidential information in the same way that I cannot phone up your bank and ask to see a list of the transactions that you have made. Any bank has to be extremely careful about protecting the private transactions of it's customers and would be subject to heavy fines if it revealed this information without the customer's consent.
Why do people buy them when they would be cheap to make for themselves? Convenience. While you could easily find some pictures and lay them out with a sentiment, buy some card stock, print in colour, trim it, and perhaps glue on some glitter or whatnot, and then find an envelope that fits it, it's likely to take you an hour or more to do so. And you'll invest far more than $6 on your printer and various inventories. I made cards for my kids- we had construction paper, glitter, coloured markers etc and there was no need for an envelope. But most people will find it quicker and simpler to buy one fully assembled. The cost of the online ones is weird I agree. Perhaps people are also not confident they can compose a good greeting? Why do stores stock $6 cards that they buy for $3 (retail markup is 50-100% and I'm sure it's closer to 100% for cards) when a different supplier might provide them for $2? Well, even if such a supplier existed, I'm sure the store would be happy to sell for $6 still (see: people buy them) so there would be no consumer impact. A store that sells cards for $5 isn't going to siphon customers from elsewhere because most of us just don't buy cards often enough for it to matter.  Why does nobody become that supplier who will sell them cheaper? Selling stuff is more expensive than making stuff, and getting your product into retail stores is hard. Hard means time and time means money and all of that contributes more to the card price than the ink and paper do. That said, dollar stores sell cards, for a dollar typically, and people do buy them. I find they have less colours and the artwork is cruder. Perhaps you even get what you pay for when it comes to design, layout, printing etc. "First, note that a share represents a % of ownership of a company. In addition to the right to vote in the management of the company [by voting on the board of directors, who hires the CEO, who hires the VPs, etc...], this gives you the right to all future value of the company after paying off expenses and debts. You will receive this money in two forms: dividends approved by the board of directors, and the final liquidation value if the company closes shop. There are many ways to attempt to determine the value of a company, but the basic theory is that the company is worth a cashflow stream equal to all future dividends + the liquidation value. So, the market's ""goal"" is to attempt to determine what that future cash flow stream is, and what the risk related to it is. Depending on who you talk to, a typical stock market has some degree of 'market efficiency'. Market efficiency is basically a comment about how quickly the market reacts to news. In a regulated marketplace with a high degree of information available, market efficiency should be quite high. This basically means that stock markets in developed countries have enough traders and enough news reporting that as soon as something public is known about a company, there are many, many people who take that information and attempt to predict the impact on future earnings of the company. For example, if Starbucks announces earnings that were 10% less than estimated previously, the market will quickly respond with people buying Starbucks shares lowering their price on the assumption that the total value of the Starbucks company has decreased. Most of this trading analysis is done by institutional investors. It isn't simply office workers selling shares on their break in the coffee room, it's mostly people in the finance industry who specialize in various areas for their firms, and work to quickly react to news like this. Is the market perfectly efficient? No. The psychology of trading [ie: people panicking, or reacting based on emotion instead of logic], as well as any inadequacy of information, means that not all news is perfectly acted upon immediately. However, my personal opinion is that for large markets, the market is roughly efficient enough that you can assume that you won't be able to read the newspaper and analyze stock news in a way better than the institutional investors. If a market is generally efficient, then it would be very difficult for a group of people to manipulate it, because someone else would quickly take advantage of that. For example, you suggest that some people might collectively 'short AMZN' [a company worth half a trillion dollars, so your nefarious group would need to have $5 Billion of capital just to trade 1% of the company]. If someone did that, the rest of the market would happily buy up AMZN at reduced prices, and the people who shorted it would be left holding the bag. However, when you deal with smaller items, some more likely market manipulation can occur. For example, when trading penny stocks, there are people who attempt to manipulate the stock price and then make a profitable trade afterwards. This takes advantage of the low amount of information available for tiny companies, as well as the limited number of institutional investors who pay attention to them. Effectively it attempts to manipulate people who are not very sophisticated. So, some manipulation can occur in markets with limited information, but for the most part prices are determined by the 'market consensus' on what the future profits of a company will be.  Additional example of what a share really is: Imagine your neighbor has a treasure chest on his driveway: He gathers the neighborhood together, and asks if anyone wants to buy a % of the value he will get from opening the treasure chest. Perhaps it's a glass treasure chest, and you can mostly see inside it. You see that it is mostly gold and silver, and you weigh the chest and can see that it's about 100 lbs all together. So in your head, you take the price of gold and silver, and estimate how much gold is in the chest, and how much silver is there. You estimate that the chest has roughly $1,000,000 of value inside. So, you offer to buy 10% of the chest, for $90k [you don't want to pay exactly 10% of the value of the company, because you aren't completely sure of the value; you are taking on some risk, so you want to be compensated for that risk].  Now assume all your neighbors value the chest themselves, and they come up with the same approximate value as you. So your neighbor hands out little certificates to 10 of you, and they each say ""this person has a right to 10% of the value of the treasure chest"". He then calls for a vote from all the new 'shareholders', and asks if you want to get the money back as soon as he sells the chest, or if you want him to buy a ship and try and find more chests. It seems you're all impatient, because you all vote to fully pay out the money as soon as he has it. So your neighbor collects his $900k [$90k for each 10% share, * 10], and heads to the goldsmith to sell the chest. But before he gets there, a news report comes out that the price of gold has gone up. Because you own a share of something based on the price of gold, you know that your 10% treasure chest investment has increased in value. You now believe that your 10% is worth $105k. You put a flyer up around the neighborhood, saying you will sell your share for $105k. Because other flyers are going up to sell for about $103-$106k, it seems your valuation was mostly consistent with the market.  Eventually someone driving by sees your flyer, and offers you $104k for your shares. You agree, because you want the cash now and don't want to wait for the treasure chest to be sold. Now, when the treasure chest gets sold to the goldsmith, assume it sells for $1,060,000 [turns out you underestimated the value of the company]. The person who bought your 10% share will get $106k [he gained $2k]. Your neighbor who found the chest got $900k [because he sold the shares earlier, when the value of the chest was less clear], and you got $104k, which for you was a gain of $14k above what you paid for it. This is basically what happens with shares. Buy owning a portion of the company, you have a right to get a dividend of future earnings. But, it could take a long time for you to get those earnings, and they might not be exactly what you expect. So some people do buy and sell shares to try and earn money, but the reason they are able to do that is because the shares are inherently worth something - they are worth a small % of the company and its earnings." I think you are mixing two different concepts here. The average investor, in the quoted reference, means an average single investor like you or like me. the average investor consistently under-performs the market. However, you then ask the question and you seem to refer to all investors as a group; individuals, institutions, investment banks, et al. since together, investors own 100% of the stock in every company? Every investor could match the performance of the market easily and at low fees by simply buying an S&P index fund and holding it. In fact, some investors can even beat the market with the addition of some stocks. Here is the ten-year chart of Berkshire-Hathaway B compared to the S&P 500.   There are other examples. However, few of us have the discipline to do so. We read questions here every week about the coming turbulence in the market, about the next big trend, about the next bubble, etc. The average investor thinks he is smarter than the market and buys on a whim or sells likewise and misses out on the long, slow overall growth in the markets. Finally, the title of your question is “Dalbar: How can the average investor lose money?” I doubt that the average investor loses money in the past several years. Not making as much money as is easily possible is not at all the same as losing money. I am not interested in watching stock exchange rates all day long. I just want to place it somewhere and let it grow Your intuition is spot on! To buy & hold is the sensible thing to do.  There is no need to constantly monitor the stock market. To invest successfully you only need some basic pointers. People make it look like it's more complicated than it actually is for individual investors. You might find useful some wisdom pearls I wish I had learned even earlier.  Stocks & Bonds are the best passive investment available. Stocks offer the best return, while bonds are reduce risk. The stock/bond allocation depends of your risk tolerance. Since you're as young as it gets, I would forget about bonds until later and go with a full stock portfolio. Banks are glorified money mausoleums; the interest you can get from them is rarely noticeable. Index investing is the best alternative. How so? Because 'you can't beat the market'. Nobody can; but people like to try and fail.  So instead of trying, some fund managers simply track a market index (always successfully) while others try to beat it (consistently failing). Actively managed mutual funds have higher costs for the extra work involved. Avoid them like the plague.  Look for a diversified index fund with low TER (Total Expense Ratio). These are the most important factors. Diversification will increase safety, while low costs guarantee that you get the most out of your money. Vanguard has truly good index funds, as well as Blackrock (iShares).  Since you can't simply buy equity by yourself, you need a broker to buy and sell. Luckily, there are many good online brokers in Europe. What we're looking for in a broker is safety (run background checks, ask other  wise individual investors that have taken time out of their schedules to read the small print) and that charges us with low fees. You probably can do this through the bank, but... well, it defeats its own purpose.  US citizens have their 401(k) accounts. Very neat stuff. Check your country's law to see if you can make use of something similar to reduce the tax cost of investing. Your government will want a slice of those juicy dividends. An alternative is to buy an index fund on which dividends are not distributed, but are automatically reinvested instead.  Some links for further reference:  Investment 101, and why index investment rocks: However the author is based in the US, so you might find the next link useful.  Investment for Europeans: Very useful to check specific information regarding European investing. Portfolio Ideas: You'll realise you don't actually need many equities, since the diversification is built-in the index funds.  I hope this helps! There's not much more, but it's all condensed in a handful of blogs. Check out WorldCap.org. They provide fundamental data for Hong Kong stocks in combination with an iPad app. Disclosure: I am affiliated with WorldCap. "It is possible to make a REST API call providing the ISIN to get the ticker in the response:  Python code for getting ticker for ISIN=US4592001014:  import requests  url = 'https://api.openfigi.com/v1/mapping'  headers = {'Content-Type':'text/json', 'X-OPENFIGI-APIKEY':'myKey' }  payload = '[ {""idType"":""ID_ISIN"",""idValue"":""US4592001014""}]'   r = requests.post(url, data=payload, headers=headers)" You can get this data from a variety of sources, but likely not all from 1 source.  Yahoo is a good source, as is Google, but some stock markets also give away some of this data, and there's foreign websites which provide data for foreign exchanges.    Some Googling is required, as is knowledge of web scraping (R, Python, Ruby or Perl are great tools for this...). You'd have to buy that information. Quoting from this page, Commercial Historical Data Higher resolution and more complete datasets are generally not available for free. Below is a list of vendors which have passed our quality screening (in total, we screened over a dozen vendors). To qualify, the vendor must aggregate data from all US national/regional exchanges as only complete datasets are suitable for research use. The last point is especially important as there are many vendors who just get data from a couple sources and is missing important information such as dark pool trades. They offer some alternatives for free data: Daily Resolution Data 1) Yahoo! Finance– Daily resolution data, with split/dividend adjustments can be downloaded from here. The download procedure can be automated using this tool. Note, Yahoo quite frequently has errors in its database and does not contain data for delisted symbols. 2) QuantQuote Free Data– QuantQuote offers free daily resolution data for the S&P500 at this web page under the Free Data tab. The data accounts for symbol changes, splits, and dividends, and is largely free of the errors found in the Yahoo data. Note, only 500 symbols are available unlike Yahoo which provides all listed symbols. And they list recommendations about who to buy the data from.