Stock Market: The Business of Investing

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This noisy place is a stock exchange. Here expert salespeople called brokers buy and sell shares of companies. The shares are known as stocks. People who own stock in a company, own part of that company.

brokers to buy and sell stocks for them. If a company earns money, its stock increases in value. If the company does not earn money, the stock decreases in value.

Big Board. That is the name given to a list of stocks sold on the New York Stock Exchange.

Investors and brokers watch the Big Board to see if the stock market is a bull market or a bear market. In a bear market, prices go down. In a bull market, prices go up.

The meaning of a bear market is thought to come from an old story about a man who sold the skin of a bear before he caught the bear. An English dictionary of the sixteen hundreds said, "To sell a bear is to sell what one has not."

Investors are always concerned about the possibility of a company failing. In the modern world, a company that does not earn enough profit is said to go belly up. A company that goes belly up dies like a fish. Fish turn over on their backs when they die. So they are stomach, or belly, up.

windfall.

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