How does a small worker co-op track/manage stocks/shares
What I know about small companies and companies who are not listed on the stock markets is this: If a small company has shares issued to different people either within an organization or outside the value of the shares is generally decided by the individual who wants to sell the share and the buyer who wants to buy it. Suppose my company issued 10 shares to you for your help in the organization. Now you need money and you want to sell it. You can offer it at any price you want to to the buyer. If the buyer accepts your offer thats the price you get. So the price of the share is determined by the price a buyer is willing to buy it at from you. Remember the Face value of the shares remains the same no matter what price you sell it for. Now annual profit distribution is again something called dividends. Suppose my company has 100 shares in total out of which I have given you 10. This means you are a 10% owner of the company and you will be entitled to 10% of the net profit the company makes. Now at the end of the year suppose my company makes a 12,000 USD net profit. Now a panel called board of directors which is appointed by share holders will decide on how much profit to keep within the company for future business and how much to distribute about share holders. Suppose they decide to keep 2000 and distribute 10,000 out of total profit. Since you own 10% shares of the company you get 1000. The softwares you are talking are accounting softwares. You can do everything with those softwares. After-all a company is only about profit and loss statements.
Not necessarily. You can set any rules that you like, and you can get capital from other sources. In our company's case, you have to work there for a year before you are eligible to join the co-op. The buy in is given as an interest free loan taken through payroll deduction. We don't get to share the profits generated by the labor of people who are not members of the company. Those stay as retained earnings. We can take on loans as well as outside investment as long as the outside investors aren't given voting rights (via restricted preferred stock). "Discussing individual stocks is discouraged here, so I'll make my answer somewhat generic. Keep in mind, some companies go public in a way that takes the shares that are held by the investment VCs (venture capitalists) and cashes them out of their positions, i.e. most if not all shares are made public. In that case, the day after IPO, the original investors have their money, and, short of the risk of being sued for fraud, could not care less what the stock does.  Other companies float a small portion up front, and retain the rest. This is a way of creating a market and valuing the company, but not floating so many shares the market has trouble absorbing it. This stock has a ""Shares Outstanding"" of 2.74B but has only floated 757.21M. The nearly 2 billion shares held by the original investors certainly impact their wallets with how this IPO went.  See the key statistics for the details." Michael gave a good answer describing the transaction but I wanted to follow up on your questions about the lender. First, the lender does charge interest on the borrowed securities. The amount of interest can vary based on a number of factors, such as who is borrowing, how much are they borrowing, and what stock are they trying to borrow.  Occasionally when you are trying to short a stock you will get an error that it is hard to borrow. This could be for a few reasons, such as there are already a large amount of people who have shorted your broker's shares, or your broker never acquired the shares to begin with (which usually only happens on very small stocks). In both cases the broker/lender doesnt have enough shares and may be unwilling to get more. In that way they are discriminating on what they lend. If a company is about to go bankrupt and a lender doesnt have any more shares to lend out, it is unlikely they will purchase more as they stand to lose a lot and gain very little.  It might seem like lending is a risky business but think of it as occurring over decades and not months. General Motors had been around for 100 years before it went bankrupt, so any lender who had owned and been lending out GM shares for a fraction of that time likely still profited.  Also this is all very simplified. JoeTaxpayer alluded to this in the comments but in actuality who is lending stock or even who owns stock is much more complicated and probably doesnt need to be explained here. I just wanted to show in this over-simplified explanation that lending is not as risky as it may first seem. "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-the-dismal-science-1503679118) reduced by 94%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; In a recent essay, Ricardo Reis, an economist at the London School of Economics, argues that failing to foretell a financial crash is no more an indictment of economics than failing to predict when a patient will die is an indictment of medicine.  &gt; Economists didn&amp;#039;t predict the financial crisis, Prof. Reis notes, but they did help to arrest it by applying theory and experience: &amp;quot;The economy did not die, and a Great Depression was avoided, in no small part due to the advances of economics over many decades.""  &gt; Economists ask: Will it change employers&amp;#039; demand for workers who earn the minimum wage? Or what they pay workers who earn just above the minimum? Or the prices they charge, or how much market share they lose to companies that don&amp;#039;t face the higher minimum or how much they invest in automation? Does it reduce turnover and thus make workers more productive?   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6x2mby/in_defense_of_the_dismal_science_full_article/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~201507 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **economist**^#1 **economic**^#2 **work**^#3 **More**^#4 **economy**^#5" Shares often come associated with a set of rights, such as ability to vote in the outcome of the company. Some shares do not have this right, however. With your ability to vote in the outcome of the company, you could help dictate that the company paid dividends at a point in time. Or many other varieties of outcomes. Also, if there were any liquidity events due to demand of the shares, this is typically at a much higher price than the shares are now when the company is private/closely held. Most businesses have some sort of software to manage their client data.  Most of these various software and/or services are industry specific.  Black Diamond seems to be a client management tool targeting investment advisers. From the black diamond site Reach an unparalleled level of productivity and transform your client conversations. You don't need one of these unless you're a professional investment adviser with so many clients you can't track them yourself or need more robust reporting or statement generation tools. For your purposes most regular brokers, Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, TD, etc, have more than enough tools for the retail level investor.  They have news feeds, security analysis papers, historical data, stock screeners, etc.  You, a regular retail investor doesn't need to buy special software, your broker will generally provide these things as part of the service. You can use a tool like WikiInvest the advantage being it can pull data from most brokerages and you don't have to enter them manually. I do not know how well it handles dividends though. "You can start investing with any amount. You can use the ShareBuilder account to purchase ""partial"" stocks through their automatic investment plan. Usually brokers don't sell parts of stock, and ShareBuilder is the only one allowing it IMHO using its own tricks. What they do basically is buy a stock and then divide it internally among several investors who bought it, while each of the investors doesn't really own it directly. That's perfect for investing small amounts and making first steps in investing."