Correct term for describing how “interesting” a stock is to buy
You can call it a stock rating of say between 0 to 5 or 0 to 10 or whatever scale you want to use.  It should not be called a recommendation but rather a rating based on the criterial you have analysed. Also a scale from say 0 to 5 is better than using terms like buy, hold and sell.
"Stock price is determined by the buyers and sellers, correct? Correct! ""Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it""-Publius Syrus What causes people to buy or sell? Is it news? earnings? stock analysis and techniques? All of these things influence investors' perception of how much a stock is worth. If AMZN makes a lot of money one quarter, then the price might go up. But maybe public perception of AMZN changes because of a large scandal. This could cause the share price to decline even with the favorable earnings report. Why do these 'good' or 'bad' news make people want to buy/sell a stock? People invest to make money. If it looks like a company is going to take a turn for the worst, people will sell. If it looks like the company has a bright, cash-laden future in front of them, people will buy. News is one of the many factors people use to determine how well a company will do. Theoretically could a bunch of people short AMZN and drive down the price regardless of how well it is doing? Say investors wanted to boycott AMZN in order to drive down the cost and get some cheap shares. This is pretty silly, but say for the sake of the argument that everyone who owned AMZN decided to sell their shares and no other investor was willing to buy the shares for less than $0.01, then AMZN shares would be ""worth"" $0.01 in that aspect. That is extremely unlikely to happen, though, for two reasons:" More like the market had a correction. Anybody with two brain cells to rub together understands that WWIII is not happening here. Go buy some defense stock.  EDIT: The trolls downvoting me..how about manning up and actually explaining your take? Or are you too busy buying canned goods for your bomb shelters? "I probably don't understand something. I think you are correct about that.  :) The main way money enters the stock market is through investors investing and taking money out. Money doesn't exactly ""enter"" the stock market.  Shares of stock are bought and sold by investors to investors.  The market is just a mechanism for a buyer and seller to find each other. For the purposes of this question, we will only consider non-dividend stocks. Okay. When you buy stock, it is claimed that you own a small portion of the company. This statement has no backing, as you cannot exchange your stock for the company's assets. For example, if I bought $10 of Apple Stock early on, but it later went up to $399, I can't go to Apple and say ""I own $399 of you, here you go it back, give me an iPhone."" The only way to redeem this is to sell the stock to another investor (like a Ponzi Scheme.) It is true that when you own stock, you own a small portion of the company.  No, you can't just destroy your portion of the company; that wouldn't be fair to the other investors.  But you can very easily sell your portion to another investor.  The stock market facilitates that sale, making it very easy to either sell your shares or buy more shares. It's not a Ponzi scheme.  The only reason your hypothetical share is said to be ""worth"" $399 is that there is a buyer that wants to buy it at $399.  But there is a real company behind the stock, and it is making real money. There are several existing questions that discuss what gives a stock value besides a dividend: The stock market goes up only when more people invest in it. Although the stock market keeps tabs on Businesses, the profits of Businesses do not actually flow into the Stock Market. In particular, if no one puts money in the stock market, it doesn't matter how good the businesses do. The value of a stock is simply what a buyer is willing to pay for it.  You are correct that there is not always a correlation between the price of a stock and how well the company is doing.  But let's look at another hypothetical scenario. Let's say that I started and run a publicly-held company that sells widgets.  The company is doing very well; I'm selling lots of widgets.  In fact, the company is making incredible amounts of money.  However, the stock price is not going up as fast as our revenues.  This could be due to a number of reasons: investors might not be aware of our success, or investors might not think our success is sustainable.  I, as the founder, own lots of shares myself, and if I want a return on my investment, I can do a couple of things with the large revenues of the company: I can either continue to reinvest revenue in the company, growing the company even more (in the hopes that investors will start to notice and the stock price will rise), or I can start paying a dividend.  Either way, all the current stock holders benefit from the success of the company." US Treasury securities are the safest investment. You can buy short term by buying T-Bills.  You buy T-bills at a discount to face. For example, to buy a four week T-bill the treasury will take $99.98 out of your account. In four weeks the treasury will deposit $100 into your account. The $0.02 difference is your Intrest on the loan. Compounded over a year (13 four week periods) you get a 0.24% interest. But (presumably) more importantly (to you) you get your original $99.98 back.  Your government cannot nationalize money that you have on loan to the United States Government.  Edit : oops, I dropped a decimal position in my original calculation of compounded rate of interest. It is now corrected. "I would change that statement to ""very few people can CONSISTENTLY beat the market "". Successful strategies will get piled into and reduce returns. Markets will pick up inefficiencies, but at the same time they do exists. Tons of interesting reading especially in regards to value. Is there a risk premium that we don't know for value? Or is it a market behavior thing?" Yep, you have it pretty much right.   The volume is the number of shares traded that day. The ticker is giving you the number of shares bought at that price in a given transaction, the arrow meaning whether the stock is up or down on the day at that price.   Institutional can also refer to pensions, mutuals funds, corporates; generally any shareholder that isn't an individual person. "Since doodle77 handled arbitrage, I'll take goodwill.  Goodwill is an accounting term that acts much like a ""plug"" account: you add/subtract to it the amount that makes everything balance.  In the case of goodwill, it generally only applies to mergers &amp; acquisitions.  The theory (and justification) is this: firms buy other firms at prices other than the market price (usually higher), and it is assumed that this is because the acquirer values its acquisition more than other people do.  But whether you use historical prices or market prices when you add (subtract) assets and liabilities to to (from) your balance sheet, this will never add up, because you paid more (less) than the assets are worth in the market, so more (less) cash flowed out than assets flowed in.  The difference goes into the goodwill account, so firms with a large goodwill account are ones that have made lots of acquisitions." "I commend you for your desire to be a smart and engaged investor. Regarding the other comments, yes the market is unpredictable and dangerous, but such is everything that leads to profit.  I am currently reading, ""Advanced Options Pricing Models"" (Katz and McCormick) - mighy be at your local library. The book is helpful because in explaining the options market, it covers basic stock methodologies and then builds on them as it pursues a quant's math/computation based view of the market. The book is highly math oriented and discusses authors' custom design scripts/alogrithms to analyze market behavior. See similar post about technical analysis (since it often directs short term trading decisisions)."