Tracking stocks

To track how your stocks are doing, you have to look at stock listings. Stock listings are published in most of the newspaper (e.g. Dawn). The listings look confusing at first, since they look like a mixture of numbers, but can be a very useful tool when tracking your stock's progress. The listings are organized into many columns, including the following information:

Company name: This field is usually abbreviated in the listings, and listed alphabetically.

Symbol: This field is a one to five character symbol used as a sort of nickname for the company.

Volume: The volume is the amount of stocks that were traded the day before.

High, Low and Close: These are the highest and lowest price of the stock the day before, and the closing price for the day before. This is an indicator of how much the price of the stock fluctuated throughout the previous day.

Net change: This is the change of the price of the stock from the previous day. This gives you an idea whether the price is dropping or rising.

In addition to the stock listings, other useful information about companies is available in the Annual Reports that reflects the balance sheet, income statement and cash flows and states the reasons for changes in these financial statements during the year.