Beginner: How Stocks Actually Work

Everything that people assume you already know but nobody ever actually teaches you: what a share is, where it's traded, why the price moves, and how you'd buy one.

• What Is a Stock? Ownership, share counts, and why a company would hand over a slice of itself.
• The Stock Market: NYSE, NASDAQ and Who You Trade With Exchanges, the order book, and what really happens in the two seconds after you tap Buy.
• Why Prices Move: Supply, Demand and Sentiment Price is not value. It is the last number two people agreed on.
• Brokerages and Reading a Stock Quote Robinhood vs Fidelity vs Schwab, and how to decode price, volume and market cap.
• Indices, Bull Markets and Bear Markets The S&P 500, the Dow, the NASDAQ Composite, and what "the market is down" means.
• Dividends and the Long Game Getting paid to hold, compounding, and why your time horizon changes everything.
• Know Your Risk Profile Risk tolerance versus risk capacity, and a seven-question assessment that tells you how much volatility to build in.
• Walkthrough: Buying Your First Share A complete, click-by-click run through one share of Apple and one share of VOO.
• Recap: What You Now Know Everything the Beginner track covered, in one page, and what the Intermediate track does with it.