How do stocks work and what exactly is a stock? These questions were not answered in school and most people don’t know how these work. So, we’ll dive into what a stock is and how does it works or makes money.
Buying stocks make investing in the stock market seem like a big and unexplored world. There seems to be an endless amount of information and it’s difficult to understand what you need to know. Determining how do stocks work is not that mysterious once you get an understanding of what they are.
What is stock market volatility?
Investing in the stock market does come with risks, but with the right investment strategies, it can be done safely with minimal risk of long-term losses. Day trading, which requires rapidly buying and selling stocks based on price swings, is extremely risky. Conversely, investing in the stock market for the long-term has proven to be an excellent way to build wealth over time.
For example, the S&P 500 has a historical average annualized total return of about 10% before adjusting for inflation. However, rarely will the market provide that return on a year-to-year basis. Some years the stock market could end down significantly, others up tremendously. These large swings are due to market volatility, or periods when stock prices rise and fall unexpectedly.
If you’re actively buying and selling stocks, there’s a good chance you’ll get it wrong at some point, buying or selling at the wrong time, resulting in a loss. The key to investing safely is to stay invested — through the ups and the downs — in low-cost index funds that track the whole market, so that your returns might mirror the historical average.
Three excuses that keep you from making money investing
The stock market is the only market where the goods go on sale and everyone becomes too afraid to buy. That may sound silly, but it’s exactly what happens when the market dips even a few percent, as it often does. Investors become scared and sell in a panic. Yet when prices rise, investors plunge in headlong. It’s a perfect recipe for “buying high and selling low.”
To avoid both of these extremes, investors have to understand the typical lies they tell themselves. Here are three of the biggest:
1. ‘I’ll wait until the stock market is safe to invest.’
This excuse is used by investors after stocks have declined, when they’re too afraid to buy into the market. Maybe stocks have been declining a few days in a row or perhaps they’ve been on a long-term decline. But when investors say they’re waiting for it to be safe, they mean they’re waiting for prices to climb. So waiting for (the perception of) safety is just a way to end up paying higher prices, and indeed it is often merely a perception of safety that investors are paying for.
What drives this behavior: Fear is the guiding emotion, but psychologists call this more specific behavior “myopic loss aversion.” That is, investors would rather avoid a short-term loss at any cost than achieve a longer-term gain. So when you feel pain at losing money, you’re likely to do anything to stop that hurt. So you sell stocks or don’t buy even when prices are cheap.
2. ‘I’ll buy back in next week when it’s lower.’
This excuse is used by would-be buyers as they wait for the stock to drop. But as the data from Putnam Investments show, investors never know which way stocks will move on any given day, especially in the short term. A stock or market could just as easily rise as fall next week. Smart investors buy stocks when they’re cheap and hold them over time.
What drives this behavior: It could be fear or greed. The fearful investor may worry the stock is going to fall before next week and waits, while the greedy investor expects a fall but wants to try to get a much better price than today’s.
3. ‘I’m bored of this stock, so I’m selling.’
This excuse is used by investors who need excitement from their investments, like action in a casino. But smart investing is actually boring. The best investors sit on their stocks for years and years, letting them compound gains. Investing is not a quick-hit game, usually. All the gains come while you wait, not while you’re trading in and out of the market.
What drives this behavior: an investor’s desire for excitement. That desire may be fueled by the misguided notion that successful investors are trading every day to earn big gains. While some traders do successfully do this, even they are ruthlessly and rationally focused on the outcome. For them, it’s not about excitement but rather making money, so they avoid emotional decision-making.
Stock trading information
Most investors would be well-advised to build a diversified portfolio of stocks or stock index funds and hold on to it through good times and bad. But investors who like a little more action engage in stock trading. Stock trading involves buying and selling stocks frequently in an attempt to time the market.
The goal of stock traders is to capitalize on short-term market events to sell stocks for a profit, or buy stocks at a low. Some stock traders are day traders, which means they buy and sell several times throughout the day. Others are simply active traders, placing a dozen or more trades per month. (Interested in individual stocks? View our list of the best-performing stocks this year.)
Investors who trade stocks do extensive research, often devoting hours a day to following the market. They rely on technical stock analysis, using tools to chart a stock’s movements in an attempt to find trading opportunities and trends. Many online brokers offer stock trading information, including analyst reports, stock research and charting tools.
Bull markets vs. bear markets
Neither is an animal you’d want to run into on a hike, but the market has picked the bear as the true symbol of fear: A bear market means stock prices are falling — thresholds vary, but generally to the tune of 20% or more — across several of the indexes referenced earlier.
Bull markets are followed by bear markets, and vice versa, with both often signaling the start of larger economic patterns. In other words, a bull market typically means investors are confident, which indicates economic growth. A bear market shows investors are pulling back, indicating the economy may do so as well.
The good news is that the average bull market far outlasts the average bear market, which is why over the long term you can grow your money by investing in stocks.
The S&P 500, which holds around 500 of the largest stocks in the U.S., has historically returned an average of around 7% annually, when you factor in reinvested dividends and adjust for inflation. That means if you invested $1,000 30 years ago, you could have around $7,600 today.
The importance of diversification
You can’t avoid bear markets as an investor. What you can avoid is the risk that comes from an undiversified portfolio.
Diversification helps protect your portfolio from inevitable market setbacks. If you throw all of your money into one company, you’re banking on success that can quickly be halted by regulatory issues, poor leadership or an E. coli outbreak.
To smooth out that company-specific risk, investors diversify by pooling multiple types of stocks together, balancing out the inevitable losers and eliminating the risk that one company’s contaminated beef will wipe out your entire portfolio.
But building a diversified portfolio of individual stocks takes a lot of time, patience and research. The alternative is a mutual fund, the aforementioned ETF or an index fund. These hold a basket of investments, so you’re automatically diversified. An S&P 500 index fund, for example, would aim to mirror the performance of the S&P 500 by investing in the 500 companies in that index.
The good news is you can combine individual stocks and funds in a single portfolio. One suggestion: Dedicate 10% or less of your portfolio to selecting a few stocks you believe in, and put the rest into index funds.
Index funds or individual stocks?
If that 10% annual return sounds good to you, then the place to invest is in an index fund. Index funds comprise dozens or even hundreds of stocks that mirror an index such as the S&P 500, so you need little knowledge about individual companies to succeed. The main driver of success, again, is the discipline to stay invested.
Yes, you potentially can earn much higher returns in individual stocks than in an index fund, but you’ll need to put some sweat into researching companies to earn it.
Conclusion
Stocks are one of the worst investments you can make. The question is, how do stocks work? The aim of this article will be to explain how stocks work so that you have a better understanding of why they are not the best investment. By the end of this article, you will have a better understanding on how do stocks work so that you are able to make an informed decision.