What Stocks/Shares (Equity) Are And How Do Shareholders Make Money?

Jargon is the biggest hurdle to every new investor, particularly when it comes to those who want to invest in stocks. For that reason, it's important that before someone starts focusing on losses and gains, or the BSE versus the NSE, it's important to understand what stocks really are and what they represent. You can't make any money until you grasp the fundamentals of the tools you're working with, after all. 

Put simply, stocks represent a share in a company. If someone goes online and buys a share of ONGC stock then that individual now has a stake in how well ONGC does. If the company does well, the investor does well. If the company does poorly, then the investor can lose money. How much one stands to gain or lose depends on how much stock that person has in the company, and how that particular company performs.

Let's use an example to make this a little bit clearer. Say that Company ABC wants to attract investors. As such it divides itself up into 5,00,000 shares of stock. For every person who buys stock, that money goes to the company so it can hire new employees, build new stores and generally attempt to get a bigger share of the market. Seen this way, it's clear that trading stock is great for the company. but how do you, the investor, make money?

Method 1: Make Money Trading Stocks
Trading stocks is the most well-known way to make money on the stock market. The price of a stock is liquid, climbing and falling within the space of days or even hours. The trick to make money as a trader is to buy the stock when its price is low, and to sell it when the price rises. So, say that a stock broker heard Reliance Industries is claiming a bigger part of the market and it's poised to rebound from a slump. He or she might buy stock at Rs.50 a share, and wait. If the stock goes up then the broker can sell it at a profit. So if the stock climbs to Rs.90 a share the broker has made a Rs. 40 per share profit. That's not terribly impressive for a single share, but if the broker purchased 100 shares, or 1,000 shares then that profit is going to go up pretty quickly.

It doesn't matter whether you hang onto a stock for an hour, a year or a decade; if you sell it for more than you paid for it you made a profit.

Method 2: Making Money With Stock Dividends
When someone is a stockholder in a company, that company's profits are also the stockholder's profits. The increasing value of a stock is just one instance of this. Another may be dividends paid to shareholders by the company. In plain English, that means that every quarter the company will take a segment of its profits, split it up and give those profits to stockholders according to how much stock someone has. The more profit the company makes, the more money the stockholder gets paid at the end of the quarter. The ideal situation for you to be in is to hold stock in a company that pays dividends, and which is making record profits. If you hold onto your shares then as long as the company is making money, you're making money. In essence you're being paid to own the stock, because when you bought it you paid for a share of the company. That share of the company comes with your own little piece of the profits pie.