

Close: The last price a stock traded at when a trading session ends.The opening price is determined by matching all limit and market buy and sell orders received before the trading session begins to arrive at a fair initial price. Open: The initial price of a stock on any given trading day.Say a company’s stock is trading at $25 per share and the company’s yearly earnings are $3 per share, then the P/E of that stock is $25/$3 = 8.3. P/E ratio: The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is derived by dividing the price of the stock by the amount of money the company has earned over the year per share.The high and low prices can be very important to technical analysts and short-term traders who derive trading “pivot points” from these significant price levels. Employees in a higher tax bracket benefit more from tax-exempt employer-paid health insurance than those in a lower tax bracket. High and low: Stocks fluctuate during the trading session, reaching a high and a low price point in every trading session. A refundable universal tax credit would be equitably financed by using the lost revenue from the tax-exempt employer-paid health insurance.For example, if a stock is priced at $100 per share and pays a quarterly dividend of $1 per share, then the annual yield on that stock would be $4, representing a dividend yield of 4% of the $100 share price. Yield: A stock’s yield is the percentage of its price that is paid out as a dividend.When a stock goes “ex-dividend,” the stock’s price is usually adjusted downward by subtracting the dividend amount from the initial opening price of the stock. Shareholders need to have owned the stock on the date of record to receive the dividend typically 2 to 3 weeks later on the ex-dividend date. Dividend: The stock’s dividend consists of the amount of money per share that a company pays out on the ex-dividend date to shareholders of record on a specific date.Today’s ticker is electronic, but it has the same function of recording the time and sales price of every transaction in a stock, as well as the amount traded in most cases. The ticker was once recorded on a tape and the information printed on it was transmitted telegraphically across the country on a ticker system from 1870 until 1970. Ticker: The ticker shows the published flow of transactions in any given stock issue.
