The stock market is a place where buyers and sellers meet and trade securities. A security is a stock, bond, commodity, or future which can be traded on an exchange. For our project, we will concentrate on stocks. When an investor buys stock, he or she buys a small piece of ownership in a company. Trading on the NYSE is done just like an auction.
Brokers buy and sell from a specialist, who acts as the auctioneer.
Normally, brokers try to buy low and sell high. Each individual company is part of an industry. An industry is a group of companies that do the same thing. For example, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM all make computers. Thus, they are part of the computer industry.