vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
I strongly suggest you go to www.investor.gov as it has excellent information regarding these types of questions. A mutual fund is a company that pools money from many investors and invests the money in securities such as stocks, bonds, and short-term debt. The combined holdings of the mutual fund are known as its portfolio. Investors buy shares in mutual funds. Each share represents an investor’s part ownership in the fund and the income it generates. When you buy shares of a mutual fund you're buying it at NAV, or net asset value.  The NAV is the value of the fund’s assets minus its liabilities. SEC rules require funds to calculate the NAV at least once daily. Different funds may own thousands of different stocks.  In order to calculate the NAV, the fund company must value every security it owns.  Since each security's valuation is changing throughout the day it's difficult to determine the valuation of the mutual fund except for when the market is closed.  Once the market has closed (4pm eastern) and securities are no longer trading, the company must get accurate valuations for every security and perform the valuation calculations and distribute the results to the pricing vendors.  This has to be done by 6pm eastern.  This is a difficult and, more importantly, a time consuming process to get it done right once per day.  Having worked for several fund companies I can tell you there are many days where companies are getting this done at the very last minute. When you place a buy or sell order for a mutual fund it doesn't matter what time you placed it as long as you entered it before 4pm ET.  Cutoff times may be earlier depending on who you're placing the order with.  If companies had to price their funds more frequently, they would undoubtedly raise their fees.
One difference is the bid/ask spread will cost you more in a lower cost stock than a higher cost one. Say you have two highly liquid stocks with tiny spreads: If you wanted to buy say $2,000 of stock: Now imagine these are almost identical ETFs tracking the S&P 500 index and extrapolate this to a trade of $2,000,000 and you can see there's some cost savings in the higher priced stock. As a practical example, recently a popular S&P 500 ETF (Vanguard's VOO) did a reverse split to help investors minimize this oft-missed cost.
"Both prices are quotes on a single share of stock. The bid price is what buyers are willing to pay for it. The ask price is what sellers are willing to take for it. If you are selling a stock, you are going to get the bid price, if you are buying a stock you are going to get the ask price. The difference (or ""spread"") goes to the broker/specialist that handles the transaction."
Like others have said, mutual funds don't have an intraday NAV, but their ETF equivalents do. Use something like Yahoo Finance and search for the ETF.IV. For example VOO.IV. This will give you not the ETF price (which may be at a premium or discount), but the value of the underlying securities updated every 15 seconds.
A few of the answers are spot on but here's another thing to consider: the type of trade. For example, I sometimes day trade stocks with momentum where the stock price is spiking relatively fast. A limit order in this situation may never get filled and you will miss out on the trade. A market order will get you filled but you mostly likely pay more than your limit order. However you are now catching the wave up.  Overall, using a limit or market is relative to your trading style and the type of trade. I always prefer to use a limit buy order.
"Some companies issue multiple classes of shares.  Each share may have different ratios applied to ownership rights and voting rights.  Some shares classes are not traded on any exchange at all.  Some share classes have limited or no voting rights.   Voting rights ratios are not used when calculating market cap but the market typically puts a premium on shares with voting rights. Total market cap must include ALL classes of shares, listed or not, weighted according to thee ratios involved in the company's ownership structure.  Some are 1:1, but in the case of Berkshire Hathaway, Class B shares are set at an ownership level of 1/1500 of the Class A shares. In terms of Alphabet Inc, the following classes of shares exist as at 4 Dec 2015: When determining market cap, you should also be mindful of other classes of securities issued by the company, such as convertible debt instruments and stock options.  This is usually referred to as ""Fully Diluted"" assuming all such instruments are converted."
My instinct says that there should be no difference. Your instincts are right. Your understanding of math is not so much. You sold $100K at the current price of 7500000RUB, but ended up buying at 3500000, you earned 3500000RUB. That's 100% in USD (50% in RUB). You bought 7500000RUB for the current price of $100K, but sold later for $200K. You earned $100K (100% in USD), which at that time was equal 3500000RUB. You earned 3500000RUB. That's 50% in RUB. So, as your instincts were saying - no difference. The reason percentages are different is because you're coming from different angles. For the first case your currency is RUB, for the second case your currency is USD, and in both cases you earned 100%. If you use the same currency for your calculations, percentages change, but the bottom line - is the same.
"1) Are the definitions for capital market from the two sources the same? Yes. They are from two different perspectives. Investopedia is looking at it primarily from the perspective of a trader and they lead-off with the secondary market. This refers to the secondary market: A market in which individuals and institutions trade financial securities. This refers to the primary market: Organizations/institutions in the public and private sectors also often sell securities on the capital markets in order to raise funds. Also, the Investopedia definition leaves much to be desired, but it is supposed to be pithy. So, you are comparing apples and oranges, to some extent. One is an article, as short as it may be, this other one is an entry in a dictionary. 2) What is the opposite of capital market, according to the definition in investopedia? It's not quite about opposites, this is not physics. However, that is not the issue here. The Investopedia definition simply does not mention any other possibilities. The Wikipedia article defines the term more thoroughly. It talks about primary/secondary markets in separate paragraph. 3) According to the Wikipedia's definition, why does stock market belong to capital market, given that stocks can be held less than one year too? If you follow the link in the Wikipedia article to money market: As money became a commodity, the money market is nowadays a component of the financial markets for assets involved in short-term borrowing, lending, buying and selling with original maturities of one year or less. The key here is original maturities of one year or less. Here's my attempt at explaining this: Financial markets are comprised of money markets and capital markets. Money is traded as if it were a commodity on the money markets. Hence, the short-term nature in its definition. They are more focused on the money itself. Capital markets are focused on the money as a means to an end. Companies seek money in these markets for longer terms in order to improve their business in some way. A business may go to the money markets to access money quickly in order to deal with a short-term cash crunch. Meanwhile, a business may go to the capital markets to seek money in order to expand its business.
"You are comparing ""market caps"" and ""enterprise value"".  If the company has four billion dollars cash in the bank, then the value would be four billion plus whatever the business itself is worth as a business. If the business itself is only worth 400 million, then you would have 4.4bn market caps and 400 million enterprise value. The ""enterprise value"" is basically how much the business would be worth if it had no cash or no debt.  These numbers would be a very unusual situation. It could happen for example if a big company has sold 90% of its business for cash. When you buy a share of the company, you get a tiny share of the business and you own a tiny share of the cash. This stock will very likely keep its value, but won't make much money.  On the other hand, more common would be a company where the business is worth 4bn, but the company has also 4bn debt. So it is worth exactly zero. Market caps close to zero, but enterprise value $4bn, because you ignore the debt in the enterprise value.  Edit: Sorry, got the ""enterprise value"" totally wrong, read millions instead of billions: Your numbers would mean that you have a huge, huge company with close to 440bn debt. Most likely someone made a mistake here. A ""normal"" situation would be say a company with a business that is worth $500 million, but they have $100 million debt, so market caps = $400 million but enterprise value = $500 million.  PS. Yahoo has the same nonsense numbers on their UK site, and for other companies (I just checked Marks and Spencer's which apparently has an enterprise value of 800 billion pound with a totally ridiculous P/E ratio."
Difference between a limit and market order is largely a trade-off between price certainty and timing certainty. If you think the security is already well priced, the downside of a limit order is the price may never hit your limit and keep trading away from you. You'll either spend a lot of time amending your order or sitting around wishing you'd amended your order.  The downside of a market order is you don't know the execution price ahead of time. This is typically more of a issue with illiquid instruments where even smaller orders may have price impact. For small trades in more liquid securities your realized price will often resemble the last traded price. Hope that helps. Both have a purpose, and the best tool for the job will depend on your circumstances.
I don't think you're missing anything. Many modern trading systems actually warn you when trying to enter a market order, asking if you are sure that you wouldn't prefer to set a limit. I fully agree with you that it is usually just better to define a limit even 20% higher than just doing a market trade. Let me give you some examples when you still might prefer to use a market order instead of a limit: But even in those two examples a (wide) limit order might just be the safer thing to do.  So, what it really comes down to is speed: A market order has no other criterias to be defined, is thus entered faster and saves you a few seconds that might be crucial.
Back end fees should not really matter much in DCA vs VA as they are both ways of deploying money in the markets and back end fees happen when selling not deploying.  The only difference I can think of would be if the back end fees have a holding period and if you need to take the money out before that period end some money may be subject to a higher fee.  The difference should not generally be large and since it is largely random whether DCA or VA deploys the capital more quickly it makes little difference. On a related note, DCA or VA makes little difference and when transaction fees are significant or time frames are long (retirement) generally, on average, both lose to lump-sum investing. Finally, as Chris mentioned mutual funds with load fees (especially back end but even front end) are considered poor investment choices as the vast majority don't give excess returns that justify the heavy fee load.
"This is a great question precisely because the answer is so complicated. It means you're starting to think in detail about how orders actually get filled / executed rather than looking at stock prices as a mythical ""the market"". ""The market price"" is a somewhat deceptive term. The price at which bids and asks last crossed & filled is the price that prints. I.e. that is what you see on a market price data feed. ] In reality there is a resting queue of orders at various bids & asks on various exchanges.  (source: Larry Harris. A size of 1 is 1H = 100 shares.) So at first your 1000H order will sweep through the standing queue of fills. Let's say you are trading a low-volume stock. And let's say someone from another brokerage has set a limit order at a ridiculous price. Part of your order may sweep through and part of it get filled at a ridiculously high price. Or maybe either the exchange or your broker / execution mechanism somehow will protect you against the really high fill. (Let's say your broker hired GETCO, who guarantees a certain VWAP.) Also people change their bids & asks in response to what they see others do. Your 1000H size will likely be marked as a human counterparty by certain players. Other players might see that order differently. (Let's say it was a 100 000H size. Maybe people will decide you must know something and decide they want to go the same direction as you rather than take the opportunity to exit. And maybe some super-fast players will weave in and out of the filling process itself.) There is more to it because, what if some of the resting asks are on other venues? What if both you and some of the asks match with someone who uses the same broker as you? Not only do exchange rules come into play, but so do national regulations. tl;dr: You will get filled, with price slippage. If you send in a big buy order, it will sweep through the resting asks but also there are complications."
Theoretically, it's a question of rate of return. If a desired or acceptable rate of return for market makers' capital is X, and X is determined by the product of margin & turnover then higher turnover means lower margin for a constant X.  Margin, in the case of trading, is the bid/ask spread, and turnover, in the case of trading, is volume. Empirically, it has been noted in the last markets still offering such wide-varying evidence, equity options: http://faculty.baruch.cuny.edu/lwu/890/mayhew_jf2002.pdf
Price doesn't mean anything.  Price is simply total value (market capitalization) divided by number of shares. Make sure you consider historical dividends when hunting for big yields.  It's very possible that the data you're pulling is only the annualized yield on the most recent dividend payment. Typically dividends are declared in dollar terms.  The total amount of the dividend to be issued is then divided by the number of shares and paid out.  Companies rarely (probably never but rarely to avoid the peanut gallery comments about the one company that does this) decide dividend payments based on some proportion of the stock price.   Between company A and company B paying approximately the same historical yield, I'd look at both companies to make sure neither is circling the tank.  If both look strong, I'd probably buy a bit of both.  If one looks terrible buy the other one.  Don't pick based on the price.
"Say we have stock XYZ that costs $50 this second. It doesn't cost XYZ this second. The market price only reflects the last price at which the security traded. It doesn't mean that if you'll get that price when you place an order. The price you get if/when your order is filled is determined by the bid/ask spreads. Why would people sell below the current price, and not within the range of the bid/ask? Someone may be willing to sell at an ask price of $47 simply because that's the best price they think they can sell the security for. Keep in mind that the ""someone"" may be a computer that determined that $47 is a reasonable ask price. Remember that bid/ask spreads aren't fixed, and there can be multiple bid/ask prices in a market at any given time. Your buy order was filled because at the time, someone else in the market was willing to sell you the security for the same price as your bid price. Your respective buy/sell orders were matched based on their price (and volume, conditional orders, etc). These questions may be helpful to you as well: Can someone explain a stock's ""bid"" vs. ""ask"" price relative to ""current"" price? Bids and asks in case of market order Can a trade happen ""in between"" the bid and ask price? Also, you say you're a day trader. If that's so, I strongly recommend getting a better grasp on the basics of market mechanics before committing any more capital. Trading without understanding how markets work at the most fundamental levels is a recipe for disaster."
"Lots of questions: In general, no. Market Capitalization and Equity represent 2 different things.  Equity first, the equity of a firm is the value of the assets (what it owns) less its liabilities (what it owes) and consists (broadly) of two components - share capital (what the firm gets when it sells to investors as part of an IPO or subsequent share issue) and retained earnings (what the firm has as a result of making profits and not paying them out as dividends). This is the theoretical liquidation value of the firm - what it is worth if it stops trading, sells all its assets and pays all its debts. Market Capitalization is the current value of the future cash flow of the firm as perceived by the market - the value today of all the dividends that the firm will pay in the future for as long as it exists. This is the theoretical going concern value of the firm - what it is worth as a functioning business. In general, Market Capitalization is bigger than Equity - if it isn't the firm is worth more as scrap than as an operating business. Um ... no. If you don't have any shares then you are by definition not an owner. Having shares is what makes you an owner. What I think you mean is, is it possible for the owner(s) of a private company to sell all of its shares when it goes public? The answer is yes. It is uncommon for a start-up owner to do this but it is standard practice for ""corporate raiders"" who buy failing companies, take them private, restructure them and then take them public again - they have done their job and they are not interested in maintaining an ownership stake. Nope. See above and below. Not at all, equity is an accounting construct and market capitalization is about market sentiment. Consider the following hypothetical firm: It has $1m in equity, it makes $4m in profit and will do for the foreseeable future, it pays all of that $4m out as dividends - if we work on a simple ROI of 10% then this firm is worth $40m dollars - way more than its equity."
"Generally, ETFs work on the basis that there exists a pair of values that can be taken at any moment in time: A Net Asset Value of each share in the fund and a trading market price of each share in the fund.  It may help to picture these in baskets of about 50,000 shares for the creation/redemption process. If the NAV is greater than the market price, then arbitrageurs will buy up shares at the market price and do an ""in-kind"" transaction that will be worth the NAV value that the arbitrageurs could turn around and sell for an immediate profit. If the market price is greater than the NAV, then the arbitrageurs will buy up the underlying securities that can be exchanged ""in-kind"" for shares in the fund that can then be sold on the market for an immediate profit. What is the ETF Creation/Redemption Mechanism? would be a source on this though I imagine there are others. Now, in the case of VXX, there is something to be said for how much trading is being done and what impact this can have. From a July 8, 2013 Yahoo Finance article: At big option trade in the iPath S&P 500 VIX Short-Term Futures Note   is looking for another jump in volatility.  More than 250,000 VXX options have already traded, twice its daily   average over the last month. optionMONSTER systems show that a trader   bought 13,298 August 26 calls for the ask price of $0.24 in volume   that was 6 times the strike's previous open interest, clearly   indicating new activity. Now the total returns of the ETF are a combination of changes in share price plus what happens with the distributions which could be held as cash or reinvested to purchase more shares."
As others have stated, the current price is simply the last price at which the security traded. For any given tick, however, there are many bid-ask prices because securities can trade on multiple exchanges and between many agents on a single exchange. This is true for both types of exchanges that Chris mentioned in his answer. Chris' answer is pretty thorough in explaining how the two types of exchanges work, so I'll just add some minor details. In exchanges like NASDAQ, there are multiple market makers for most relatively liquid securities, which theoretically introduces competition between them and therefore lowers the bid-ask spreads that traders face. Although this results in the market makers earning less compensation for their risk, they hope to make up the difference by making the market for highly liquid securities. This could also result in your order filling, in pieces, at several different prices if your brokerage firm fills it through multiple market makers. Of course, if you place your order on an exchange where an electronic system fills it (the other type of exchange that Chris mentioned), this could happen anyway. In short, if you place a market order for 1000 shares, it could be filled at several different prices, depending on volume, multiple bid-ask prices, etc. If you place a sizable order, your broker may fill it in pieces regardless to prevent you from moving the market. This is rarely a problem for small-time investors trading securities with high volumes, but for investors with higher capital like institutional investors, mutual funds, etc. who place large orders relative to the average volume, this could conceivably be a burden, both in the price difference across time as the order is placed and the increased bookkeeping it demands. This is tangentially related, so I'll add it anyway. In cases like the one described above, all-or-none (AON) orders are one solution; these are orders that instruct the broker to only execute the order if it can be filled in a single transaction. Most brokers offer these, but there are some caveats that apply to them specifically. (I haven't been able to find some of this information, so some of this is from memory). All-or-none orders are only an option if the order is for more than a certain numbers of shares. I think the minimum size is 300 or 400 shares.
After searching a bit and talking to some investment advisors in India I got below information. So thought of posting it so that others can get benefited. This is specific to indian mutual funds, not sure whether this is same for other markets. Even currency used for examples is also indian rupee. A mutual fund generally offers two schemes: dividend and growth. The dividend option does not re-invest the profits made by the fund though its investments. Instead, it is given to the investor from time to time. In the growth scheme, all profits made by the fund are ploughed back into the scheme. This causes the NAV to rise over time. The impact on the NAV The NAV of the growth option will always be higher than that of the dividend option because money is going back into the scheme and not given to investors. How does this impact us? We don't gain or lose per se by selecting any one scheme. Either we make the choice to get the money regularly (dividend) or at one go (growth). If we choose the growth option, we can make money by selling the units at a high NAV at a later date. If we choose the dividend option, we will get the money time and again as well as avail of a higher NAV (though the NAV here is not as high as that of a growth option). Say there is a fund with an NAV of Rs 18. It declares a dividend of 20%. This means it will pay 20% of the face value. The face value of a mutual fund unit is 10 (its NAV in this case is 18). So it will give us Rs 2 per unit. If we own 1,000 units of the fund, we will get Rs 2,000. Since it has paid Rs 2 per unit, the NAV will fall from Rs 18 to Rs 16. If we invest in the growth option, we can sell the units for Rs 18. If we invest in the dividend option, we can sell the units for Rs 16, since we already made a profit of Rs 2 per unit earlier. What we must know about dividends The dividend is not guaranteed.