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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.
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Key considerations for investment in equities

   
 

Understanding why you are investing is the first step in structuring a portfolio. There are few questions investors need to ask themselves and review with their broker before starting to invest.

Specifically, What are my investment objectives? What is this money for? What kind of risk am I willing to take? What is my time horizon? It is important that you work closely with your advisor so you both have a clear understanding of your specific needs and goals.
    
    Understanding risk is an integral factor that is required to be evaluated before making any investment. You can view risk as portfolio volatility, as the risk of not achieving your goals, or as the risk of permanent capital loss. When you are assessing risk, questions to ask yourself include:
How much volatility am I willing to accept? What are the consequences if I do not achieve my investment objectives? How large a loss can I sustain? Do I want to use leverage?

Risk and returns are generally related. Over the long term, increasing your risk typically leads to higher expected returns, while lowering your risk leads to lower expected returns. However, this is not always so. For some occasions, which may occur for an extended period of time, higher levels of risk may lead to lower returns, and vice versa.

Goals and risk tolerance should be the basis for establishing investment guidelines for your portfolio. These guidelines will enable you to structure your portfolio and provide you with a framework that allows you to review and understand your investment performance.
 
    Whenever you hire a broker to invest in the stocks it’s not necessary that your results would be same as the market movements. In some cases brokers advise to invest in stocks that are not highly correlated with stock index due to the small capitalization of that particular scrip in the market.
   
    The goal of the investor, in most cases, is to maximize return. Higher returns are often related with higher degree of risk. Investor should not take unnecessary risk to earn higher profits because it posts a great deal of threat to its basic equity and investments. Investors could avoid risk by diversifying its portfolio in different sectors, which usually pays off in terms of better returns.
   
    Information regarding companies invested in and their economic profile should be exposed to the investor. Investor should be well aware of the financial background, management style and the nature of business of the company to make an adequate investment. Investing in the stock market requires looking ahead to anticipate future events in the company's life and changes in its business environment, to minimize risk and maximize return on investment.
    
    Investors should be aware of the fact that investments in the stock usually do not result in immediate profits. A sound investment strategy avoids speculative moves. An investor should have excess reserves with its broker to protect himself against frequent fluctuations in stock.
     
    Investors can invest in their money in stock in following ways:
   

Shares: It is the direct mode of investment in which investor directly sell and purchase stocks of various companies through the brokers or dealers.
    
    Sound strategy for investment in stock market requires either professional’s advice or own stock dealing decisions, which are often, time consuming. Despite the time consideration it is advisable to pursue own investment strategy because it is more rewarding than seeking broker’s opinion.
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Costs
Costs that are associated with stock dealing usually fall under the following heads:
 
Daily trade charges cost incurred by the investor for intra day transactions.
 
Badla charges are the charges incurred by the clients for carry over transactions commonly known as COT.
 
Delivery charges cost incurred by the investor for delivery transactions.
It is highly recommended that the investors should have a proper understanding of the commission structure of the brokerage service. The structure varies from broker to broker in most cases. It is advisable that the investor should ask his broker about all the cost associated with stock dealings to arrive at his net profit position
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