Learn to use Yahoo Finance: part 1

Yahoo finance is a real-time stock market display website. This site is used mostly for college level finance classes as well as investment classes. If you signed up with a yahoo.com email address it will let you pick stocks and develop your own portfolio and watch the performance. This site is only for displaying of market-performance and not for trading securities.

Today's blog post I will introduce what each of the terms reflect in yahoo finance website.

On top left, shows the real-time DOW Jones and Nasdaq index's percentage changes for today.

For demonstrate the layout of Yahoo Finance, I pulled out Dell Inc stock.
Last Trade: is the price or the value of a share of Dell for the trade time mentioned in the line below.
Change; reflect the percentage change of share price from the starting share price of Dell stock.
Prev. Close; is the last share price at which Dell stock was closed the day before.
Open, is the price at which it was open today.
Bid and Ask; Ask price is always higher than Bid price, which means if an investor to buy a Dell stock he would pay the Ask price, and if you sell a stock you will get Bid price. The difference between Bid and Ask price is called the Spread and is kept as profit by the broker.

1yr Target Est, is the estimated price of the Dell stock in 1 year from now.
Day's Range, shows the total fluctuation of the stock price of Dell for the day. The line below that is 52 weeks combined range of price fluctuation. This will give a potential buyer of Delll stock an idea of how high the stock price has been over last 52 weeks, as well as how low is has been.
Volume is the number of shares trading at the moment. This is also the number of outstanding shares of Dell, which is less than the Authorized shares. And companies will not always sell all their authorized shares.
Next Lines, Avg Vol (3m): average volume of shares traded over past three months.
Market cap, or market capitalization is a quick way to estimate the value of a company. Also is the Stock Price x Number of outstanding stocks. Roughly, if market cap is larger than $5 Billion is it called "Large Cap", $1-5 Billion is "Mid Cap", and $1 Billion or less being the "Small Cap".
P/E(ttm), in general P/E is the Earnings Yeild, price of a share relative to its earnings, which gives a percentage return metric. In ttm basis, means the current market price is divided by "Trainling twelve month" earnings per share. This look at the past 4 Quarters of earnings for Dell.
EPS (ttm), once again looking 4 Quarters back for the earnings per share.
And the last line "Div & Yield" is past divident payments.

Also the graph on the right side shows days progress of Dell Inc.. Stock price in a graphic format. Below the graph you can see "1d 5d 3m ..." clicking these each will display and explicit graph for the selected period of time. For some investors looking at a graph tells more than numerical values. In the next topic I wish to cover other components on Yahoo Finance real-time stock viewer website. Please feel free to flood the comments with your feedbacks and questions.