Shares

  

Categories: Stocks

Slices of pie. When you hear "shares," think: common stock. (See: Preferred Shares. See: Preferred Stock.)

You buy a share. Of stock. If a company has 10 million shares of stock and you own a million, you own 10% of the company; you get 10% of the vote for the board of directors. Welcome to America.

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Finance: What Rights Does a Public Stock...67 Views

00:02

Finance, a la Shmoop. What rights do you have as a common [intro screen]

00:07

stock public shareholder? All right, so you've saved your newspaper delivery money now [question on chalk board]

00:13

for a year, saved over two grand, and you've had your

00:16

eye on a hundred shares of whatever.com, which conveniently hit exactly 20 bucks [person buys shares]

00:21

a share today, including commissions, if you want to sell it. So you buy a hundred

00:27

shares for two grand. Now what? What rights do you have? Well, you always have

00:33

your right to party... old song, ask your parents. All right, but that won't help you [people party]

00:39

here. The company does wonderfully over the next few years and hits 40 bucks a

00:42

share. Well, you have a right to sell the stock, book your profit, pay your taxes... [share price graph]

00:47

yeah. And the same would be true if the company did horribly. Yeah, you could sell

00:51

it at 12 bucks, book your losses, come back to fight another day after crying. [sad words]

00:55

But as a minority shareholder in whatever.com where you own a hundred

01:00

shares out of the total 20 million they have outstanding, you own 100/20 million, [tiny person with lots of shares]

01:05

or 0.000005% of the company. So what rights should you

01:15

have? You're not exactly the control shareholder. Well, as a common shareholder, [person realizes his own insignificance in this cruel world]

01:20

American law gives you only a few rights, the biggest of which is to be able to

01:25

vote for the board of directors. You know, who then hires the CEO. So that's it. [person votes for board]

01:30

That's your big right that you have as a public shareholder. You can vote for

01:34

the board. And yes, you will cast a fraction 100/20 million of the [really tiny pie sliver]

01:40

votes, a very small percentage. About like voting for your local congressman, you'll

01:44

have some impact but not much. The key take away? Well, you don't have many [person talks to congressman]

01:48

rights. If they pay a dividend, you'll get that, and there are some other little

01:50

legal things, but don't hold your breath without a big oxygen bottle. So before [person with oxygen mask]

01:55

you hop into bed with a given stock investment, be pretty comfy that you have

01:59

confidence in the lunatics running the asylum. Yeah, or it could end up [people in asylum]

02:06

being a very bad investment.

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