What is a stock?
Think of a company you interact with every week. Maybe your phone is an Apple, your sneakers are Nike, your evenings are Netflix. Pick one — this will be your anchor company for the whole course.
One idea makes everything else in markets click: that company is divided into millions — sometimes billions — of small pieces, and anyone can own some of them. Each piece is called a share of stock. Own a share of Nike and you own a genuine sliver of the whole thing — the factories, the brand, the future profits.
Why do companies do this?
Companies sell shares to raise money — to build products, open markets, hire people. In exchange, the buyers of those shares become shareholders: part-owners who benefit if the company does well.
This is not a metaphor. Shareholders can vote on important company decisions and receive a slice of profits when the company pays them out (you'll meet that as a dividend later in this unit).
Where do you see this in real life?
When news says "Apple is worth three trillion dollars," that number is just simple math: the price of one share, multiplied by the number of shares that exist. The price of one share moves all day while markets are open, because people keep buying and selling those pieces from each other.
That flowing price is the heartbeat you'll learn to read in this course — not to predict it, but to understand what it is telling you.
How many pieces are there?
Enough that one of them is affordable. Apple has cut itself into roughly fifteen billion shares; Nike into about a billion and a half. The count is public — every listed company reports it in its filings, as its shares outstanding — and it is the second half of the headline multiplication: fifteen billion shares at $200 each is three trillion dollars, the same fifteen billion at $330 is five, which is why the number in the news moves with the price every day. The count changes too. Companies buy their own shares back — some cancel them, some hold them in reserve — and while those shares sit out of the count, each remaining piece is a slightly larger slice, until new shares issued to employees or investors push the count back up. And occasionally a company splits one share into several, which changes the count and the price together and your slice not at all.
Try it now
Pick your anchor company — the one whose products you know best. You will come back to it in every lesson of this course, so choose one you actually care about.
Here is a year of one company's share price, drawn from real daily data:
- Read the right-hand edge. That single number is the price of ONE piece of the company — one share out of billions.
- Now Measure from the left-hand edge to the right. The percentage it reports is a year of the crowd changing its mind, in one number.
- Do the same reading for your own anchor company wherever you follow it — a broker app, a finance site, anywhere a price is printed. The skill is the reading, and it does not belong to any one source.
Green or red, up or down — you now own a front-row seat, and it cost you nothing. In the next lesson we'll figure out what actually made that number move today.
A note on what we do here. EODHD Academy teaches how markets work. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything — we'll observe, measure and understand, using real market data as our laboratory.