What is a stock or share?

A Stock or Share is not owning a number that you see on your screen every day. Owning stocks is taking a partial ownership of real companies that typically employ thousands of people, owns buildings, factories, machinery and valuable intellectual properties.

If the companies that you own are good, the stock value will not go down to zero even though market prices are volatile.

In a downturn, to extrapolate that the share prices of good companies will keep on going down endlessly till you lose everything is an irrational fear as real companies aren’t just a number.

How does a stock market work?

Every day, the stock market matches buyers and sellers to determine prices of stocks traded that day. So, if there are more willing buyers than sellers on that day, the share price will tend to rise and vice-versa. Assuming there is only one seller and buyer on a particular day that can reach a deal at a certain price. That will be the price of the stock for that day. As the daily traded shares are just a small portion of shares out of millions of the shares issued by the company, the price doesn’t represent the real value of the company.

Market pricing versus actual value of your holdings

As can be seen, the price of a stock each day is determined by different participants who, for various reasons, decide to buy or sell on that day. As such, the price for each day represent a summary of the sentiment of market participants for that single day.

Let’s use the Warren Buffet’s analogy to explain the difference between stock value and stock price further. Warren Buffet compares owning a stock to owning a house. Assuming on a daily basis, some strangers walk pass and shout out a price at your house, it doesn’t mean that price is what your house is worth as you will not be willing to sell unless the price is near to the real value of your house.

It’s the same for stocks, whatever daily price the market indicates has no significance if you know the real value of the stocks. You will not sell if the price is far lower than what the company is worth.

With this knowledge, it is not appropriate to use daily stock prices to determine the actual worth of your holdings. Knowing the real value of the company forms the basis stock investments and not senseless daily pricing which can fluctuate wildly and is subjected to the emotions of random participants on that particular day.