How Do you Decide when a Stock is Attractive to Purchase?

There are two general ways of determining a stock's potential as an investment. You can look at the “fundamentals” or you can look at “technical analysis” and of course you can look at both.
Fundamental analysis looks at factors such as earnings, cash flow, debt, strength in its industry, outlook for the industry, general economic factors, interest rates, and so on. If these factors are good, then even if there are short-term setbacks, over the long run, the stock should do well.
Technical analysis looks at factors like volume of trading, cyclical behavior, trends, moving averages and many others.
Some investors use both approaches. They use fundamentals to determine the long-term potential of a company and technical analysis to decide when to buy. For example, you may believe that a certain company has great potential over the long-term and will be worth much more in years to come.
However, it could be that the current market for this company’s product is temporarily weak and that as a result, the stock price could fall. Technical analysis could be helpful in determining how far the price might fall and could provide help in indicating a good time to buy.

How to Become a Shareholder

Shares of a particular company are offered by the following methods.

Initial Public Offering

An initial public offering (IPO) is the sale of equity in a company, generally in the form of shares of common stock. These shares trade on a recognized stock market. A company goes public; to raise capital for project funding, business planning and implementation; for marketing purposes.

Rights Issue

A rights issue gives the existing shareholders the right to subscribe for new ordinary shares at an issue price lower than the prevailing market price and at a ratio equivalent to their existing shareholding. Companies carry out a rights issue when they want to raise additional funds to finance their capital requirements.

The Stock Market

Stocks in publicly traded companies are bought and sold at a stock market also known as a stock exchange. This is the most common way of buying and selling shares.