Before getting to know share/stock trading you must know what share is. A Share is the smallest unit of ownership in a joint stock company. The ownership of a share gives the owner the right to have a say in the management of the company.Only public limited companies (PLC) can issue shares to the general public. They issue shares in order to raise capital. The first issue is known as Initial Public Offering (IPO).Once people own shares by means of subscribing to IPO, they may need to have a liquidity ie selling these certificates of ownership in order to redeem their money. For this purpose secondary market has been created.
These secondary markets are known as stock market or share markets. This is the place where shares are bought and sold freely which of course is governed by the universal law of supply and demand. The shares that are more in demand goes up in price and those that are low in demand goes down.The investors in the share/stock market make money by the principle of buying low and selling high.
Share Trading Risks in Short Term Stock Trading
Regardless of time scale, a stock's price direction is always determined by supply and demand. Long term supply and demand are driven by fundamentals - company earnings, return on equity, dividends, etc. Short term supply and demand are more readily manipulated. For example a guru in a large circulation newspaper might tip a stock at the weekend. On Monday, propelled by demand from eager newspaper readers, the stock's price rises. A slightly different scenario that experienced investors will be aware of is when the stock's price does not rise on Monday, despite an army of small investors buying shares. It turns out the "guru" was helping friends who wanted to sell large shareholdings. A neat way of doing this without driving the stock's price down was to create artificial demand amongst small investors. It is much easier to artificially influence a stock's price in the short term than the long term. Benjamin Graham once said, "In the short term the stock-market acts like a voting machine, in the long term it's more like a weighing machine." In other words, supply and demand on any given day can be driven by all sorts of factors - some stranger than you might imagine. BUT, taking a long-term view, trivial factors are discarded in favor of the weight of cash the company has delivered to its shareholders and can be reasonably expected to deliver in future. Big market traders play games of bluff and double bluff on an hourly and daily basis. If someone has sufficient funds - and banks and investment houses do have the funds - it's easy to move a stock's price through large-scale buying or short-selling. Having moved the price enough to trigger short-term buy or sell signals to technical analysts, the idea is that these technical analysts will trade in the direction of the technical signals. This generates increased trading in the stock and the price moves even further in the direction that the "big players" intended. The big players then dispose of their position in the stock. The trend comes to an end and the traders who entered it late lose money. The big players, though, have profited handsomely. If you want to trade short-term, your opponents will almost certainly be better equipped, better funded and more experienced than you. 85 to 95 percent of people who try to become short-term traders fail.