How does Google Finance calculate the Institution Owned metric for a stock
"Institutional ownership has nearly lost all meaning. It used to mean mutual funds, investment banks, etc. Now, it means pension funds, who hold the rest of the equity assets directly, and insiders. Since the vast majority of investors in equity do not hold it directly, ""institutions"" are approaching 100% ownership on all major equities. Other sites still segment the data."
Many people have provided very good answers to this question and all the answers provide sound advice and justification. Below are some of my thoughts on the questions that you have put forward. 1) The investment manager question: The returns on your capital for a half year has been quite low; having said that, some investments do take more than half year to show some growth. You could try talking to your investment manager and ask where your money has been deployed and why the returns are low. If there are no real explanation given forth (which would be more likely as you have mentioned your investment manager does not like to discuss your money with you) you should conside Xolorus & Pete's advice and forthwith take all your money from investment manager and park it in the bank till you figure out what to do next with it. 2) Finances are not my forte: At 22 finance is nobodies forte, it takes longer than that; however having said that, how do you know finance is actually not your forte? Being a computer science graduate you would be more than comfortable with the mathematics required for finance. You may not have looked seriously at finance till now (I assume by your statement). Once way to be certain about this would be self learning, some good books have been refered above and there are online information, courses and articles on the Internet, for example here. You could give some spare time and explore if finance interests you or not. 3) If finance interests you: Then consider the 30K as your seed fund and take a small portion of it say 2K and try out your hand at investing on your own in the instruments that you feel most comfortable and see how you fare, you are young enough to take the risk. Rest of the money you could put in other low risk instruments (that you have identified through self study) 4) If finance does not interest you: The probably you are better off with an investment manager, as observed above, it will take some time for you to identify him/her 5) On returns: As mentioned above different instruments produce returns differently, however, one question that is universally asked is how much return on an invetment shoule one expect (you were expecting more than $12 on your investment). It is a difficult question to answer as invetment returns and investment needs depend on a persons financial goals and risk taking profile. One way to have some measure is to take 15-20 years CAGR of the stock index return and reduce it by 2-3%, that is (in many cases, not all) a reasonable return expectation in medium-long term. "If so, then if company A never pays dividends to its shareholders, then what is the point of owning company A's stock? The stock itself can go up in price. This is not necessarily pure speculation either, the company could just reinvest the profits and grow. Since you own part of a company, your share would also increase in value. The company could also decide to start paying dividend. I think one rule of thumb is that growing companies won't pay out, since they reinvest all profit to grow even more, but very large companies like McDonalds or Microsoft who don't really have much room left to grow will pay dividends more. Surely the right to one vote for company A's Board can't be that valuable.  Actually, Google for instance neither pays dividend nor do you get to vote. Basically all you get for your money is partial ownership of the company. This still gives you the right to seize Google assets if you go bankrupt, if there's any asset left once the creditors are done (credit gets priority over equity). What is it that I'm missing? What you are missing is that the entire concept of the dividend is an illusion. There's little qualitative difference between a stock that pays dividend, and a stock that doesn't. If you were going to buy the stock, then hold it forever and collect dividend, you could get the same thing with a dividend-less stock by simply waiting for it to gain say 5% value, then sell 4.76% of your stock and call the cash your dividend. ""But wait,"" you say, ""that's not the same - my net worth has decreased!"" Guess what, stocks that do pay dividend usually do drop in value right after the pay out, and they drop by about the relative value of the dividend as well. Likewise, you could take a stock that does pay dividend, and make it look exactly like a non-paying stock by simply taking every dividend you get and buying more of the same stock with it. So from this simplistic point of view, it is irrelevant whether the stock itself pays dividend or not. There is always the same decision of whether to cut the goose or let it lay a few more eggs that every shareholder has to make it. Paying a dividend is essentially providing a different default choice, but makes little difference with regards to your choices. There is however more to it than simple return on investment arithmetic: As I said, the alternative to paying dividend is reinvesting profits back into the enterprise. If the company decided to pay out dividend, that means they think all the best investing is done, and they don't really have a particularly good idea for what to do with the extra money. Conversely, not paying is like management telling the shareholders, ""no we're not done, we're still building our business!"". So it can be a way of judging whether the company is concentrating on generating profit or growing itself. Needless to say the, the market is wild and unpredictable and not everyone obeys such assumptions. Furthermore, as I said, you can effectively overrule the decision by increasing or decreasing your position, regardless of whether they have decided to pay dividend to begin with. Lastly, there may be some subtle differences with regards to things like how the income is taxed and so on. These don't really have much to do with the market itself, but the bureaucracy tacked onto the market." "Going private does not mean that the company buys its own shares, only that the freely traded shares are bought up by a private entity (this can be management =&gt; ""management buy-out"" or it can be a private investor). The stock is then not traded publicly and the company gets rid of a whole slew of compliance obligations.   In your stated example the company would essentially convert all its stock to treasury stock, which does not pay dividends and has no voting rights. From what I gather from some googling this would actually imply that the company would liquidate itself since it now has no capital anymore. Not sure on this though, an accountant might be able to help here..." A stock exchange is a marketplace where people can bring their goods [shares] to be traded. There are certain rules. Stock Exchange does not own any shares of the companies that are trading in.  The list of who owns with stock is with the registrar of each company. The electronic shares are held by a Financial Institution [Securities Depository]. So even if the exchange itself goes down, you still hold the same shares as you had before it went down. One would now have to find ways to trade these shares ... possibly via other stock exchange. This leaves the question of inflight transactions, which again would be recorded and available. Think of it similar to eBay. What happens when eBay goes bankrupt? Nothing much, all the seller still have their goods with them. All the buyers who had purchased good before have it when them ... so the question remains on inflight goods where the buyer has paid the seller and not yet received shipments ... "Option pricing models used by exchanges to calculate settlement prices (premiums) use a volatility measure usually describes as the current actual volatility.  This is a historic volatility measure based on standard deviation across a given time period - usually 30 to 90 days.   During a trading session, an investor can use the readily available information for a given option to infer the ""implied volatility"".  Presumably you know the option pricing model (Black-Scholes).  It is easy to calculate the other variables used in the pricing model - the time value, the strike price, the spot price, the ""risk free"" interest rate, and anything else I may have forgotten right now.  Plug all of these into the model and solve for volatility.  This give the ""implied volatility"", so named because it has been inferred from the current price (bid or offer). Of course, there is no guarantee that the calculated (implied) volatility will match the volatility used by the exchange in their calculation of fair price at settlement on the day (or on the previous day's settlement).  Comparing the implied volatility from the previous day's settlement price to the implied volatility of the current price (bid or offer) may give you some measure of the fairness of the quoted price (if there is no perceived change in future volatility).  What such a comparison will do is to give you a measure of the degree to which the current market's perception of future volatility has changed over the course of the trading day.   So, specific to your question, you do not want to use an annualised measure.  The best you can do is compare the implied volatility in the current price to the implied volatility of the previous day's settlement price while at the same time making a subjective judgement about how you see volatility changing in the future and how this has been reflected in the current price." Shareholders are the equity holders. They mean the same thing.  A simplified formula for the total value of a company is the value of its equity, plus the value of its debt, less its cash (for reasons I won't get into). There are usually other things to add or subtract, but that's the basic formula. It doesn't matter if the shares are owned by an institution like an asset manager or by a retail investor like you or me - it is all counted and treated the same way in terms of the corporate actions involved (cash/stock payouts). The portfolio manager at Value Research Online does this very nicely. It tracks the underlying holdings of each fund, yielding correct calculations for funds that invest across the board. Take a look at the screenshot from my account:  If you have direct equity holdings (e.g., not through a mutual fund), that too gets integrated. Per stock details are also visible.