What Does After Hour Stock Price Mean

The Investor's Easy Guide to Online Stock Price Lookup

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Understanding stock price lookup is a basic yet essential requirement for any serious investor. Whether you are investing for the long term or making short-term trades, stock price data gives you an idea what is going on in the markets.

The prices of stocks at any time impact how much your portfolio is worth. If you were to sell today, the amount you could get is generally set by current market prices.

It is important to note that there are, in fact, multiple stock exchanges as well as multiple indexes which are collectively referred to as "the market." Knowing how to use these is essential for the investor.

Take, for instance the case of Duke Energy. This company is part of a stock exchange most investors will have heard about: the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). To look up Duke Energy stock price, you can visit the New York Stock Exchange's Stock Quotes website. Search for "Duke Energy", and you get back the stock price and other financial information.

How to Use Historical Prices

Knowing how to read stock quotes is just as critical as knowing where to find them in the first place. The major online stock quote services use electronic mediums to feed back a rich information profile for each stock. When you query for a stock symbol, you will get back a wealth of information that includes historical prices, averages, and stock charts.

Let's look at the historical stock price, as an example. This information is useful because it puts current stock prices in context. For example, say a stock is trading at $300 a share some six months after an initial public offering (IPO) where shares traded at $60 a share. The historical price of $60 allows us to compare where the stock is today with what it has been valued at by the market in the past.

Thus, the historical price gives us a factual basis, for the above example, to conclude that the stock has performed very well relative to its IPO price. Historical price is just one isolated fact that allows us to evaluate the performance of a stock. For example, we should be paying attention to what has happened in the general market as well. If a stock is up only 10% in a year but the market is up 20% overall, then the stock has underperformed, even though it is up year-on-year.

Looking Up Prices From Finance Publishers

Thanks to the state of technology, a number of publications have sprung up that make current stock price lookup easy, instant and free. These are not actual exchanges, but relay data from the exchanges so that investors can access it at their convenience.

To familiarize with stock price lookup even more, let's walk through price lookup for Amazon. Amazon is a well-known technology and e-commerce company with operations all over the world. To get the current Amazon stock price, we will need to know a few pieces of information:

Company name - in this case Amazon
The exchange on which Amazon trades - Amazon trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange
Stock symbol - Amazon has a stock symbol of "AMZN", without the quotes

Now we can feed this information into one of the stock feed publishers such as Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal online, Google Finance, or Yahoo Finance. The publisher will return the current price for "AMZN", along with an indicator for NASDAQ showing us that we're getting results from the correct stock exchange.

NASDAQ Live Real Time Quotes

For technology stocks like Google, you can get prices from the NASDAQ live stock prices website. NASDAQ is a major stock exchange with a concentration of publicly-traded technology companies.

The good part about using NASDAQ's website is that it lets you check not just NASDAQ prices, but prices for stocks from other exchanges such as the NYSE.

Using Broker Live Stock Feeds

While getting prices from free information publishers works for self-education, it is not the most suitable information source for live trades.

Suppose you are ready to buy some General Electric stock, and need confirmation of the price before you buy. When looking to place a buy or sell order, it's best to go to the market directly where you will be placing the order. That way, you make trades based on prices that reflect what your trade will clear at.

For most investors, interaction with the "market" happens through a stockbroker. You should, therefore, login to your brokerage account and check prices for "GE", the stock symbol for General Electric, before placing a buy order.

Source: https://www.life123.com/article/the-investors-easy-guide-to-online-stock-price-lookup?utm_content=params%3Ao%3D740009%26ad%3DdirN%26qo%3DserpIndex

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What Does After Hour Stock Price Mean