Overview of Yahoo Finance

If you are into investing in individual stocks, Yahoo finance is a fantastic starting point for analysis. In this post we will take a brief look at what you can see in Yahoo finance and how to decipher it.

Let's get started with a concrete example. If you look up Apple (AAPL) the following overview of the company will come up:



















This screen shot was taken on the morning of January 27, 2016.

On the very first line you see the company name, ticker symbol and the exchange which in trades on (NASDAQ).

On the second line you see the price ($95.01), the associated change during market hours (down $4.98, or 4.98%) and some information about after hours trading (not always applicable).

Left column

Prev Close: previous closing price prior to this day's trading (was at $99.99, stock down $4.98, we are now at $95.01).
Open: price at which the stock began trading on this business day.
bid: current price looking to purchase (and quantity).
ask: current price looking to sell (and quantity).
1y Target Est: an estimate on the stock price in 1 year based on analyst average.
Beta: depiction of volatility as compared to S&P 500 index, over 1 indicates more volatile and under 1 indicates less volatile than the overall S&P 500.
Next Earnings Date: date of release for next earnings report.

Right column

Day's range: the extreme price range within the trading day.
52wk Range: the extreme price range within the last year (lowest and highest points).
Volume: how many stocks have been traded so far on this trading day.
Avg Vol (3m): how much volume on average per day in the past 3 months.
Market cap: the total value of all shares available (#shares*price of share).
P/E: Price/earnings ratio is an indicator of valuation. How much times more is the stock trading at currently compared to yearly earnings generated. You can think of P/E ratio as how long you would need to hold an investment so that it would generate that capital back in earnings. In this example 95.01/9.22=10.30. (P/E can only be positive, if a company experiences a loss it will have no P/E).
EPS: earnings per share, how much earnings in generated per share.
Div & Yield: what (if applicable) are the dividends paid per share in dollar amounts (and percentage).

This gives a rapid global overview of the stock and its current situation in the market place. On the right-hand side is a graph of the price fluctuation for that day, outlined by a dotted line that shows the previous close price. You can use this graph to see the historical price fluctuations of a stock.

Take away message!

At a quick glance we can find a lot of information on a company. For example, we can see that Apple is a massive company with a 526 Billion market cap. We can also see it a down a lot today (5% is a massive swing for such a large company). We can see it is trading close to the lowest it has all year. It has a P/E ratio of slightly over 10 which would indicate the stock is potentially cheap. The stock pays a substantial dividend and is producing noticeable earnings. Furthermore, at the time of this screen shot it was only 10:19AM and the volume was already at 36.6 million shares as compared to a 3-month average of 47.3 million shares. The market is open until 4PM, so we can expect this to be a very high-volume trading day. This often happens what a stock rises or drops substantially in a given day.

Note that these are simply some of the key statistics and should not solely be used to make investment decisions but do provide a starting point and basis for quickly assessing a company. This is simply a light introduction to some key statistics!


- Yinvestors.

keywords: investing, index investing, stock, dividends, common shares, company stocks, company shares, yahoo finance, price earnings ratio.