Getting Started with Stock Investing

6.7.24-getting-started-with-stocks-final.mp4
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our Getting Started with Stock Investing webcast today. I'm Connie Hill. I'm happy to be here with you, and I'm glad that you have joined me. Now, if you are somebody that is brand new to the markets, like you're a greenie, a rookie, whatever kind of label you want to give yourself, you're in the right place. So I commend you for being here. Today, we're going to take a look at some different terms, some vocabulary, and just some of the basics that you need to understand when you're getting into the stock market. And when you're new, guess what? We all need to start somewhere, and this is going to be a great place for you to be able to start.

Now, just say a friendly hello to some of our early birds that are here today. We've got Robert, Roger, Gary, Jim. We've also got Lee Boll out in the chat. Leo is going to help me with questions. Now, he's a great veteran of the markets of many years. So whatever questions you might have, feel free to put them out there in the chat. I'll catch your question, or Lee might help me catch your question. If you have questions and you are listening to this on the archive, and I know lots of you do, you go ahead, you put your question in the comment section, and I'll go back throughout the week and look at those, make sure you can get your question answered quickly as well.

Well, I'm on X, and I hope you're following me. My handle is ConnieHillCS. Lee is great to follow as well. You want to make sure you're tracking Lee Boll, B-O-H-L-C-S, as we put out educational content. Things that we kind of see going on in the market that we think you might find interesting. Let's go ahead and go through some quick disclosures. Then I will lay out the agenda that we're going to go through. What we talk about today is intended for informational and educational purposes only. Don't consider it a recommendation of any particular stock or style of investing. We will be using the downloaded paper money Thinkorswim software. It's what you download to your computer. It's the most robust. It's the best version of Thinkorswim. That's what we'll be using here today.

It's a little bit different than the web and the mobile version. Past performance of any security or strategy does not guarantee future results or success. Investing involves risk, including the loss of principal. Now, this is just kind of an overview of the different things that we're going to talk about over the coming weeks in this webcast. We're starting from the very first session here today. We're starting our series all over again. But these are the kind of topics that we're going to tackle week by week. Today, I'm going to say we're starting kind of over here, maybe in this area, maybe a little bit right before growth and value stocks, although we're going to dip our toes into that a little bit here as well.

So we'll talk about some different investing styles that will give you some vocabulary. It's going to be a little bit new to some of you and talk about that terminology. And I want to show you some additional resources that you have available to you that go beyond just coming here to our webcast today. All right, let's talk about these investing styles for just a minute. You know, when you're first new to the market and you're trying to figure out kind of where you want things to go or how you want it to fit into your portfolio, you might be hearing some things that you maybe don't relate to very well yet. But I'm hoping after today that you have a bigger comfort level with those types of things.

So we're going to talk about growth investing first, and we will spend quite a bit of time on that topic here weekly. But the idea with a growth kind of mindset is that you're expecting the stock to take off in price. Maybe it's a stock that's pretty new. Maybe they just listed recently, but they don't have to just recently list; sometimes they might just have a little niche or a niche in the marketplace as far as what their company does or the products and services they offer. But expectation is that maybe you buy it a little bit high, but you expect it to go higher. And this is quite a bit different than, say, a value investing approach; a value investing, investing approach would look at a stock.

They might, you know, somebody might roll up their sleeves and do some calculations using income statements and balance sheets, and come up with some variables that they think. You know, this stock, even though right now it's trading at, say, twenty-five dollars, I really think it's a forty-dollar stock or a fifty-dollar, whatever the numbers indicate. And so they would go ahead with that. They would buy the stock at a typically low level and be really patient while that stock increments in value. And then we have income investing. And, you know, any of these styles could be represented in everybody's anybody's portfolio. You can have all of these styles. You could be focused on just one of these styles. OK, just know there could be different parts of your portfolio that might blend or lend to that type of investing.

And so income investing is essentially a concept where people park some money in some stocks. And when I say park, I mean, they're really not going in and out of them. OK, they're like, hey, this company pays me in the form of a dividend. This stock is giving me X percent on a quarterly basis or semi-annual, whatever. It happens to be. And you're expecting and wanting to receive that income. Now, it can come in the form of a dividend or in terms of cash or possible additional stock purchase. Most of the time it's going to come in there. You're going to look for it to be income paid to you. And so you can see, yeah, each of these styles are a little bit different as far as what they're wanting to do.

Let's just talk about what a stock is. You know, share of a stock. If I can get my mouse to cooperate. There we go. Yeah. What is a stock? Now, some of you are like, I know what a stock is, Connie. That's pretty basic. But there are some people sometimes, you know, we all start somewhere and you might not really understand what stock is. Now, it gives you when you buy shares of a stock, you're actually buying ownership into a company, at least a partial owner with lots of other shareholders. And you have the right to receive some compensation for holding that stock, whether it be in the form of dividends that we just talked about, or whether it be in terms of the price of the stock going up, at least hopefully you expect that it goes up.

Right. And so just know that it's a way that you can invest in a particular company and with expectation that you're going to receive something back by doing so. OK, does it mean it's guaranteed? Of course, not. Nothing. Nothing in the market is ever going to be guaranteed. Now, I want to show you some examples of what we've just been talking about here. I'm going to go over to our Thinkorswim platform. Might be new to some of you. That's all right. I'll kind of point out what we're doing here. So as we come over to this is actually the charts tab. In fact, I'm going to do a little drawing here. This is the charts tab on our Thinkorswim software. And we are currently looking at some, a particular chart; this is kind of a basic chart.

And if you haven't seen a chart before, some people might be kind of intuitive to some people, maybe not so much. But when you're looking at a chart on this far right-hand side on the graph is basically the price of the stock. And then down here in this bottom pane, it's showing us the volume. OK, down here at the bottom, we have time. And we're going to read it starting at the oldest part of the chart, which is going to be on the left. And then the most recent part of the recent data that's showing on the chart, it's going to be over here on the far right-hand side. And then we're looking at some what we're going to call candles, which are basically showing what has happened with the price of a stock on any given day.

All right. So today, as we look at this stock, the ticker symbol is CAVA, C-A-V-A. If I were to come and put my mouse right on today's candle showing us the price action, it's going to give us some information here on the charts, very specific information. I want you with your eyes to come up to this area, this area where my mouse is pointing to that's blue. All right. And it'll show us on any given day what the date was, what the open, the high, the low and the closing price were. OK. It's going to show us that for every day. That we just rest our mouse on that data will change. And so that's just kind of some real quick basics of looking at a stock chart in case you're not familiar.

Now, as far as stocks go, CAVA that I have up here would be an example maybe of a growth stock. It's a fairly new company. Let's see when they started trading. I've got a one-year chart up here and it looks like, hey, they started trading June 15th of last year. So not quite a full year. It's past since it's been trading. So initially it's very first day of trading. It closed around $43 and change. And boy, what do we have now? It went up as high as 96 and then today it closed at about 85. So is that something that is increased in value? Absolutely. From what it was at 43 to sitting now at about 85. Yeah, that definitely would fit in that mold. And it's not like it's a little bit of growth.

It's not like it's gone up. It's not like it's gone up 2% or 5%, it's, you know, a pretty decent percentage that this stock has gone up. Now I'm going to show you another stock here. We're going to look at FMC and FMC. I'm going to even go back to a two-year chart on this. All I'm doing is clicking on the D for daily and saying, hey, what timeframe do I want to see now? And what I want to do to see is that this might be a good example of a value stock where it had a higher price. Okay. And two years ago, it's high price was about 134; then you can see what's happened with the prices. It's been dropping continuously for several months and then it's just kind of recently stabilized, right?

Maybe kind of bottomed out here about that 49, 49 in last November. And then gradually it's starting to pick up a little bit. It's not extreme, but it is a little bit. And so some investors after they. Crunch some numbers and some ratios. Yeah. They might say, this, I think is really trading at a bargain. I really think it has the potential to go up to $90 or $110, whatever it happens to be. And so this would be something that they might buy, say, man, it's beaten up. I'm going to buy it at a bargain. I'm going to be patient with it and allow it to go up. Now, the last stock we're going to look at is one that could, some people might consider an income-type stock. It's Amgen.

You're probably familiar with this pharmaceutical company. And a couple of years ago, let's see what its price was. Its price was in the neighborhood of, let's say, 246. Okay. Two years ago, it has gone up in value. It has also had some swings. And so it is something that is overall growing, but somebody that's interested in this stock might be more interested in the dividend payment. And as I come over here to the trade tab and there's a little carrot right here by default. It's closed, and I clicked on it, and it opens up this additional roll of information, and that gives us some dividend information. So this is telling us, oh, it pays a 2.9% dividend, which would be important to somebody that's maybe wanting to get into that stock for that purpose.

Looks like the actual value that they're going to pay next is $225, and they are paying it quarterly, which is really common for stocks that pay out dividends, that they do it on that quarterly basis. Okay. So not so much interested in, you know, is the stock up or down, or is it a bargain, or is it a growth stock? More important emphasis is finding something that they feel like is stable, that is paying a dividend. And usually, it's maybe mature companies and companies that many times are a lot larger in nature, and they're already through their growth phase, right? And so they want to reward the shareholders in another way. Now, I'm going to take a quick look at our chat. See if there's any questions.

Any questions that I need to follow up on here, and I think we're in pretty good shape. Lee, thank you for posting that playlist in the chat area so people can click on it and see the playlist for this particular class. I appreciate you doing that. Let's continue on here. Let's go back to our slides for a moment, and let's talk about a couple of concepts. Now, stocks will go through a quarterly process, typically, where they will file some reports with the SEC, financial reports, and then they will many times talk about it and discuss it and have a conference call with people that are interested in those particular results. And so they'll produce their income statement, their balance sheet, their cash flow statement, and things that people who are into numbers will be interested in.

And so they'll produce their income statement, their balance sheet, their cash flow statement, and things that people who are interested in. Many times that could be analysts and shareholders that will dissect this information. And so four times a year, most of those public companies are going to go through that process. We're going to start back into what we call earning season again. We're going to start that in July. So it's not for a little bit here. Typically, we'll have through the end of June to complete the second quarter where we're at right now. And then companies need some time to get the report. So we could technically be in a time frame where we don't have a lot of earnings, but most of the time, there's still going to be some earnings coming out.

Stocks that are a little bit later in reporting their earnings, kind of in the time frame where we are right now, many times are retail stocks, all right, Walmart, McDonald's, wherever we spend some money. Now, the next thing is the dividends. And I do want to spend just a moment on this dividend idea. That that is happening. That is a dividend. And what we're going to do is we're going to see how they reward shareholders is by paying them, like we saw with Anjan, that was a what? It was a 2.9% dividend. I might be misquoting myself there. But 2 point something dividend. Okay. Now, companies are not required to pay a dividend. All right. Even though they've paid it in the past, it doesn't guarantee that they're going to do it again in the future.

But there are a lot of companies that really pride themselves on what they're going to do. Just being really religious about paying that dividend and sometimes increasing that dividend a little bit. And you'll be able to find some companies that have, say, for the last 25 years have continued to pay a dividend and that dividend has been growing. Or it could even be a longer period of time. And you don't have to wait till the company has been paying a dividend for, say, 30 years before you think maybe it's a good dividend stock, right? It could be something that develops earlier. Maybe initially they're just paying a percent and a half or something like that. All right. Just keep in mind, it can always be discontinued.

Now, let's talk about a particular concept here that I didn't mention before, but I should. And that is that these dividend-paying stocks typically are not very volatile. We don't expect explosive movements on them. Like we might agree. With a growth stock, we might expect some volatility. And volatility is just extreme price movement. And it could be as the stock's going up. It could also be as the stock's coming down that it has that volatility. All right. I'm going to jump back to Thinkorswim for just a moment. Back here. And I wanted to show you about earnings and about dividends. Now, Thinkorswim has a really nice tool called a calendar tool. And it's under this market watch tab. No, it's not. It's under the analyze tab. Let me know. It's under the market watch.

I need to go download. There we go. Okay. The market watch tab. And then this last one here says calendar. This calendar is going to help us keep track of some of those news events, okay? Whether they're company related or, say, economically related. And then we have showing here what we call the EconoDay events, which are basically government reports that come out. So today, we had a couple of important reports come out. One of those was the jobs that were created during the month of May. Now, from my notes that I wrote down, it looked like the economy had generated 272,000 new jobs and only expected 185,000. Actually, that was a pretty big jump of what it actually came in at compared to what was expected.

And that did help fuel some of the direction of the market, that particular news. Now, you're going to say, well, I want to keep track of that news then, right? So on this calendar, I want you to see that I've got it highlighted to next week, okay? If I were to click on the 7th today, you're going to see it's blank. And that's because everything that was expected to come out has already come out and reported. But this is what's going to happen next week. So a couple of really big reports next week that you want to probably keep an eye out for or listen up, look for headlines on, are going to be on Tuesday. And so you could see here, Tuesday.

And this looks like it's at 7 at night, which maybe means the information is going to be released at night. But the impact of it and trading and reaction of the market on it is going to be the next trading day. So I'm going to click here, PPI. I'm going to click on it. And down here, you'll be able to see, you know, what are some of the full names of this? PPI stands for Producer Price Index. And you might not know what it does. And so you want to find out about it. And so as you click on this little [symbol] here, or not [symbol], but the PPI, it'll balloon out and it'll tell you what it's about. And it'll say, oh, okay, this is the Producer Price Index.

It measures the average price for consumers. And it'll say, oh, okay, this is the Producer Price Index. It measures the consumer goods for the production of those goods. And gives you a little bit of information about what it was last time and what we expect it to be. And the Fed's watching this really close because this can give us an idea. The Producer Price Index and the CPI, which is Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods, it will measure that. And we'll be looking to see, is inflation still running pretty hot? Is the price from last time that this given measurement, came in, is it better than last month? Or, you know, is inflation hotter or is it starting to cool down?

So that's why I say these are going to be a couple of the really big ones that we're going to notice next week. Now, over here, and I didn't point this out, maybe I should have done this a little bit better. Over here on the far left-hand side, we can tell it which things we want to look at, what items. Now, I could click over here in the show all and have it show everything. It gets a little cluttered, you might say, at certain times of the year when that happens. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take off the O'Connell Day event and I'm going to put on the earnings. Okay. So over here, I'm going to check the earnings box and not all companies do conference calls, but a lot of them really do.

So I'm going to check both boxes here. Okay. Again, this is for next week. There, you'll see there's not, a lot. So when I say a lot, meaning, you know, it's not like there's several hundred on a given day. Right now, we're in a period of time where there's a much smaller number. So here, we'll just maybe sit on Tuesday for a minute. We have a ticker symbol up here. MPAA is supposed to announce, looks like, I'm not going to be up that late. Maybe in the middle of the night, they're going to announce. Some of these other stocks are going to be really early in the morning. Actually, this is 11 AM. So there'll be a little bit after the market opens. And you can see all of these ticker symbols listed down here.

You can also, let's come over here to pets. I don't know. Maybe some of you have pets. This is Pet Med Express. They're going to announce. If you wanted to listen to their conference call, great, click right there. Right where that blue hand is. You could click on that, get into the conference call. It's going to be a little bit earlier in the morning. So, I'm going to click on the conference call. Just listen to it on your computer. Maybe you don't want to listen, but you want to know when the numbers are out. You could create an alert for it and say, hey, tell me once these numbers are out. In fact, I'll just click on it and show you. We're going to just create an alert for it.

It's going to tell us what time it's expected to come out. I'm going to go ahead. I'm just going to hit create. And that just goes to my alert book to let me know. Now, next week, we have a few, let's say a few big names. They're not incredibly huge. Let's see what day of the week this is going to be. Let's go. Okay, on the 11th is Tuesday. So, we have pets. Let's have Oracle, big major software company, started doing mergers and acquisitions years ago, buying up all sorts of other software companies that many big organizations and medium organizations use to track their numbers or their clients or what have you. Okay, Oracle. And they are like the software king. They're going to be announcing this week as well.

And so, some people might want to really be tuned into that. So, use the calendar just to help you out. Now, let's review one other thing before we come back here. So, I'm going to jump back to our slides. And I want to just talk a little bit about news. All right. News, man, it's kind of something that puts a fire under the stock that causes it to move. It can move. It can be good news. Stock moves up. It could be harder news or bad news for a company or an industry or a sector that it might react to. So, the corporate actions are some things that come out very specifically from the company that we expect. We talked about receiving dividends. It could be news that they're buying a company, acquiring a company, right?

If they go out and say, hey, we're going to go buy XYZ company, typically the company that's doing the buying will drop and the company being bought up, usually they're getting paid a premium from what they closed at the night before they went for sale or were told, hey, we're selling ourselves, right? And typically that company bumps up. So, it's nice to know what's expected when you have that kind of a situation as far as which one is likely to pop up. And which one's likely to drop. I want to talk about market news here for a minute. And that'll be like the economy reports that I showed you. Unemployment or the jobs report, like we received today. Retail sales, measures of inflation, GDP, all those types of things many times can kind of cause a specific reaction in the market.

Like if it's a really big report, like GDP, gross domestic product is a really big report. And if it comes in with a major negative, that could cause the market overall to just pull back, okay? It could set the tone of the day if it's that big of a number and that bad of a number. Now, there's one thing I want to talk to you about here over on the corporate actions, and that is stock splits. You know, when we're in super bullish times, we might have a lot of stocks that are splitting. And we've got a lot of expensive stocks right now. But one stock there's been a lot of buzz about. I've heard that Nvidia is going to be splitting their shares beginning, it's going to be trading at the new allocation next Monday on the 10th.

So let's just go look at Nvidia's chart here for a moment. Let's talk through about what happens. So I'm going to type in here, Nvidia's ticker symbol. And I'm going to maybe zoom in here a little bit, see if I can spread this out. I want you to see some of these little icons here. So I'm going to type in here, and I'm going to type in 'icons' at the bottom of the chart here. This icon with the dollar sign lets us know when a dividend has been paid. And it's kind of really super fine print, small print. It's saying right here was a $0.04 dividend was paid. This is their last earnings date and their earnings per share. Those little teensy letters say that it was $6.12.

And then they're due to have another dividend being paid here pretty soon. And then this little icon here, this purple with kind of like a lightning bolt through it, really is announcing a stock split. Now, when a stock splits, it's just reallocating shares in how they're valued. It's not going to do anything worse to your holdings or anything good per se or bad per se to those holdings. It just kind of reallocates them. So the stock split coming up is a 10 for 1, which means for every one share of stock that somebody might hold, they are going to receive 10 shares. Now, it's not going to be at today's price. Today, it closed at $12.08. It's not going to be at that price. It's going to be at a tenth of that price.

So Monday, I want you to come over here, take a look at NVIDIA, and you should see it trading closer to $120. And people that own the stock, maybe you've been working with it in paper money or something, then you will notice the number of shares you have is 10 times as much as the shares that you had today at the market close. So there's a lot of excitement around this. A question came up earlier in the week in one of our classes, and somebody said, well, when was the last time NVIDIA did a stock split? I'm going to show you. We're going to come up here to the chart. Oh, get rid of my little pink there. And we're going to come out here to a five-year chart, and we're going to look for that icon.

All right. So if you can follow my mouse here, looks like this was the last time that they split. Now, I've got a weekly chart here. So it was the week starting July 19th of 2021. They did a four-for-one split. So for every one share somebody had, they received four shares. But the value of the share was a quarter of the price that it was prior to that split taking place. And then somebody asked an interesting question. They said, how long did it take? OK. Here, when the stock split went through, it looks like the opening price was $179, OK, is what it is now. So it means it was four times bigger than that, OK? So whatever four times a $179 is, OK, maybe $600. Right?

Is what the price of the stock was then. And somebody said, well, how long did it take before it went up $100 per share? And so I was like, that's an interesting question. Let's go see. And so on the day, the opening price of the day of the split last time where it was $179, let's see how long it took to get $100 more than that. So we're going to look for $279. And so as I go out here, and here's my legend over here. Here's showing price. I'm going to come out here to about $279, right? $100. We're going to come out here to November 1st. So during the week of November 1st, it actually climbed from that $279. I take that back. It's not $279.

It was $179 climbing up to the neighborhood of about $279. Didn't take that long. So from July to November. Now, is every stock that is going to do that? Not necessarily. But typically, companies don't split their stock unless they think there's a high likelihood that it's going to continue to ramp up. And if you've been listening to the news, you'll hear that NVIDIA is knocking at the door of becoming the biggest company overtaking Microsoft. All right. So kind of some interesting pieces of news that you want to keep track of. Now, we're going to pause for just a moment here because I want to show you some resources. Okay. Very first resource I want to show you is what happens when you subscribe to our Trader Talks channel.

Now, Lee has put a link in there, I think, a little bit earlier that you could click on to subscribe to our Trader Channels talk on YouTube. Or what you could do is you could just go to the bottom of your screen on the right-hand side and click that little blue YouTube logo that says subscribe, and it'll subscribe you to our Trader Talks channel. Well, what does that do for you? It allows you to get our content a lot easier. Okay. You'll see that we have some playlists. You can see that right on this front page, there are some groupings of things that might be of interest to you because it has grouped together a lot of our beginning-type level classes.

Now, I've already said, hey, if you're a new person, this is the place to be because I'm going to give you some education here to start out with. But as I scroll down here, I'm going to go to this part here where it says 'Start Here.' And it lists some of these classes that I've done in the past, starting with the very first session. And I cover similar information, but I try to vary it a little bit, introduce a little bit different topics in this first series when we're getting familiar with vocabulary and terminology and what is a stock, what kind of stocks and investing styles there are. And so it'll lead you here. So if you're like, hey, I've got the week, I'm going to go to this part here.

And I'm going to go to this part here. And I'm going to I want to do some binge learning, just lining these up for you, makes it really easier for you to be able to find our content. OK, so I'm going to encourage you to do that. The other thing that I want you to be familiar with is where do these concepts come from? These concepts that we're going to talk about every week, where can you get your hands on it? Alright. So I'm going to have us come over here. And I'm logged in to the Charles Schwab website. I'm going to click on Learn. And then this third column over, you're going to see Courses. So as I select on Courses, some information comes up here as simple steps for retirement portfolio, stock investment, investing with fundamental analysis.

This is the number crunching type information. And then the one that we're going to spend the most time on is going to be this Stock Trading with Technical Analysis. And as I select, I'm going to see the information on here. On it, it's going to open up basically the course. So as far as you signed up for a college course and you had to go get a textbook for the class, this is your textbook. Okay. And really, it is the, I'm going to say the stones that lay the foundation for your knowledge. Everything you learn in this class, you are going to continue to learn whether you go on to fundamental investing, whether you want to become an income investor or value investor or a growth investor, or if you want to go into options or other things, futures, what have you; these are the basic concepts that you really want to be familiar with.

So you can be successful as you kind of branch out into some different areas. Okay. So again, this was from learn and then courses, and then go to the third one down. Something, if you're somebody that maybe is a Schwab user and you're, used to logging into Schwab to get your information and find things, I want you to go to schwab.com slash Schwab dash coaching. Okay. Once you type it in there the first time, then when you start typing those initials again, it's going to bring it up for you. But on here is a calendar of our events. Now, next week, we're going to start all over with our events. But what I did over here on the side is, I said, let's just look for a skill level that is beginner.

Okay. So initially, I said skill levels. And basically, it has every skill level in our calendar, right? Monday morning, all these classes we're going to have. But if you're like, 'I don't, I can't handle all of those yet.' Just click on beginner. And then you'll see what the, what the schedule is for the week. And for you personally, getting started with stock investing is a kind of a basic one to get started with; getting started with technical analysis could be a course and some information that goes hand in hand with getting started with technical analysis. Because you'll learn some of those basic technical analysis principles. We'll go over some of the basic ones that are our webcast and what we talk about. But this other class is getting started with technical analysis.

We'll talk about some of these other items that fall into that area. Okay. So those are some great resources for you. Now, let me just check in here in the chat, make sure we're in good shape. It looks like we are. Thank you so much, Lee. All right. Next up, I want to talk about indexes and what an index is. Because you may have heard, in fact, I've mentioned that the Dow Jones average company that I understand how the company does goes to the 500 oil companies. They're money-based, and you cannot have a hundred million lessons or see how those three would evens work. Means they're all different ones. Okay. If you're out- Are you scared of the term, the general markets? Yes, sir.

People are, what they're really saying is, 'What is the S&P 500 doing today?' Now, the Dow Jones Industrial Average takes the 30 largest successful companies in an index, but there's only 30 of them. But even though there's only 30, because those companies are so large, they really pull some weight in what the market does. We also have a couple of other indexes you'll hear us refer to, the NASDAQ, which is mainly, it's not solely technical stock or technical information technology stocks, although it's heavily weighted in that area. And so if you're somebody that maybe does a lot of technical type trading, or you want to maybe get into that, you'll hear that NASDAQ. And then the Russell 2,000, the Russell organization has a bunch of different indexes, but the Russell 2,000 really is some of the smallest, cap stocks, 2,000 of them, in fact.

Now, if you wanted to know, well, who's on the NASDAQ? Who's on the Dow? There's a little bit of verbiage in here about that, but let me show you where you can see that. So as we go back out to Finkerswim here for a moment, I'm going to change my ticker symbol from NVIDIA. I'm going to type in SPX, and that is the ticker symbol for the index. And maybe I'll just put this like on a one-year chart so we can see what's been happening. Just in the last year. Most of the time, it's been upward trending, and it doesn't mean every single stock in that index is upward trending, but overall as a group, yeah, that group has been upward trending. I'm going to bring up the NASDAQ, NDX.

It's going to be the NASDAQ 100 of the top 100 stocks, non-financial stocks in that technical index. Looks a little bit like this. Hitting today earlier at another all-time high. Okay, so all throughout this period of time, it kept setting new highs, new highs, new highs, and there it is. All right, you guys, we're back. Hopefully, you can hear me now. Our producers think we're back in line, so we're going to continue. Where I'm taking you, if you wanted to see the 100 stocks in the NASDAQ 100, you wanted to know what they were, you would come to this MarketWatch tab, and then over here, you're going to pick a list. Now, this has public lists that have been created for us.

It could also be your personal watch list that you could look at here, but I've highlighted the NASDAQ 100 here because those are the companies I wanted to see. Now, this is what we call a heat map, and this heat map essentially shows us what's up today, what's down today. If it's greenish, it's up. If it's reddish, it's down. If it's super green, it went up really big today. If it's super red, it went really down today. For example, this stock here, CrowdStrike, a little bit more green than some of them. It was up 2.53%. This one I'm going to point over here to, the Trade Desk, TTD, was down three plus percent. And then NVIDIA, we talked about that. Stock is going to have their stock split coming up, start trading the new way on Monday.

The size of the company, meaning their market capitalization, tells us that the market capitalization is going to go up. Well, basically, the size is represented here. So NVIDIA, very big. Microsoft, as you can imagine, very big. And when you put your mouse over it, it'll kind of balloon out and show you exactly what the market capitalization is of the company and if they were up or down today, how much that was percentage-wise. So easily, you can kind of keep track in a given day. You can open this up first thing in the morning. You can see what's trading up, what's trading down, and so forth. Just the other thing you can do here, as I mentioned, you could put in your own personal watch list.

So I'm going to just select one here that I have called Dividend Champions. And all the stocks that are in that index are showing right here. And the other thing is they're grouped together. So you can kind of see in letters here, this says Consumer Staples. Over here, we can see Energy. So we've got like Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and so forth. So there's some organization to that as well. And again, that just came off of one of my watch lists. All right. Now, typically, in all of our classes, I do want to get you acquainted with using the paper money. So we're going to just do an example trade here. We're not going to put a lot of emphasis on why we might do this particular trade.

Today is just more specifically for the mechanics. I want you to get comfortable there. Now, I'm on the trade page. I've typed in MU, which is ticker symbol for Micron. And Micron looks like traded, maybe the last price was about $130.94. There's not a buy and sell button on this page, but we will pay the asking price when it's time to buy the stock. So I'm going to just come over here and click on that asking price. And it's going to bring up a buy order down here. Now, it defaults to 100 shares, although you can change that. I'm going to put in 100 shares. I'm going to put in 100 shares. I'm going to put in 100 shares. And we're just going to do 35 shares today.

And then it's put in what the going rate of the price is. It might be a little bit different Monday morning. So I'll have to check and see if it changes much. But we'll just go ahead and put it in for the price that it is right now. We're going to say it's a limit order. This is the limit we're willing to pay. And it's just going to be good for the day on Monday. We don't get filled on Monday. We'd want to go back and evaluate it, see why we didn't get filled and if we needed to adjust the price to be able to do so. Now, as I hit confirm and send, it just brings us up a summary of the information and lets us know, OK, this is what the full value of those 35 shares.

This is what it's going to total to. And it'll include any commissions as well if there happen to be some. I'm going to go ahead and hit send. And again, the market's closed right now. So Monday morning, when it opens up, that's when it'll be eligible to be filled. OK, so as we go through each week, I'm going to do some of these. I'm going to do some of these. I'm going to do some of these. I'm going to do some sample example trades so that you get used to that, because ultimately, you want to be trading, paper trading, doing example and sample trades in your own think or swim account. All right. Mike spent some time last week on top down analysis. I'm happy that he did that.

So we're skipping over that point today. All right. Today, we talked about some vocabulary, some terms that hopefully will help you feel a little bit more comfortable as you're working with the markets. We talked about different investing styles, talked about growth, value and income type investing and talked through maybe some ideas as far as earnings and dividends and stock splits and things of that nature. So now that you're getting accustomed to some of that vocabulary, hopefully you'll feel comfortable when that news-type information comes out. And then next week, look for the CPI and the PPI that we talked about that are going to be coming out on Tuesday. Because you're going to hear some buzz about them. And you will now know what to be listening for.

Well, you guys, take some time, go into that course, start going through and building your reservoir of information. And you're going to use your whole trading and investing life. It's just information that's just vital for you. OK, it's kind of like your textbook 101 for getting involved in the markets. So have a great weekend, everyone. We will be back here Monday morning. Right. Bright and early at the opening bell. And so make sure to join us then for some Trader Talk. We'll look forward to seeing you then. Have a great weekend, everyone.