Stock Charts: Small Print, High Stakes

I'm frequently tempted to look over people's shoulders and see what they are reading. Maybe it comes from the mind-fusion of my sociology training and my journalistic career.

More often than not these days, they are perusing the stock listings. For boomers like me, that means getting out the bifocals. The print is small. But the stakes are huge.

And the terms are strange. "P/E," for instance. It stands for price/earnings ratio, which is the total value of outstanding shares divided by the company's annual earnings. What are Hi, Lo and Cls? Not the name of a new rap trio, but the highest price, lowest price and the closing price at which shares traded. In morning newspapers, that means over the previous trading day.

We've found numerous Web-based sources that can interpret this jargon-laden alphabet soup in as elementary or advanced detail as you'd wish.

• Guide to Reading the Stock Tables-- The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson has perhaps the most informative online resource on this topic. There's information on stock symbols on the various exchange summaries, and what they mean, as well as details about such everyday terms as price and volume. You may have already known that, in a stock price table, "Volume" means "the number of shares that were traded during that day." What you really should know is that the volume figure listed on a stock table "should be multiplied by 100 to determine the actual number of shares that were traded."

• New York Stock Exchange: Reading The Stock Table--A useful, glossary-like page that explains such terms as Div (dividend) and Sym (symbol). "Yld" Means yield, which the NYSE defines as "The yield, or rate of return, on a stockholder's investment?figured by dividing the annual dividend by the current price of the stock."

• Schwab On The Basics--This section of the Charles Schwab Web site has a colorful page that explains not only the basics, but the footnotes often found next to individual stock listings. The letter "s," for example, means that "a stock split or stock dividend, or a cash or cash equivalent distribution amounting to 10 percent or more, has occurred in the past 52 weeks." A hypothetical case would involve a stock priced at $80 a share that has recently issued a 2 for 1 split resulting in twice as many shares at $40 a share to most stockholders. Stock prices frequently rise after a split, increasing the value once more.
• Stocks: Price Tables in Newspapers--This resource is a section of the very comprehensive Investment FAQ site. This page is basically a table of letter symbols and explanations for each. "U" means the listed price is a 52-week high, a symbol almost guaranteed to elicit regret that you didn't by shares in the listed company way back when.

Getting Specific

Some other resources give you more details on how to read certain elements of newspaper stock tables. There's a one-click ticker symbol lookup in Quicken.com's Investment area in the Ticker Search page. Similarly, Earnings: A Measure Of Performance is a section in the Investment Education Web site of Investor's Business Daily, for which, in the interest of full disclosure, this columnist will acknowledge he writes regularly. The main page describes how to interpret the paper's own "Best Ups," "Most Downs" chart.

Every stock listing refers to the "Dow Jones Industrial Average." Ever wonder which stocks comprise the listing? There were some changes on November 1. Home Depot, Intel, Microsoft, and SBC Communications were added, while Union Carbide, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Sears, and Chevron were dropped. Read the full list here. Couldn't help but notice that three of the four additions were info-highway oriented, and three of the deletions are of companies with substantial interests in offline highway pursuits (even these guys).

--Financial journalist Russell Shaw is author of "Official Netscape Guide To Online Investments" and is a regular contributor to Investor's Business Daily. This column first published Nov. 25, 1999.