The stock market is an international market that sells off parts of companies. Invented by the Dutch in 1611 in the Netherlands, this market revolutionized how people make money. People view the stock market as a vast, complicated, multinational market only reserved for the richest. People view the stock market wrongly.
The stock market is based on supply and demand; the more shares bought instead of sold, the more expensive the shares are. The more people are selling than buying, the cheaper the shares are.

The other thing people need to understand about the stock market is its terminology, specifically stocks and shares. Think of stocks as sugar. If the entire box of sugar is the company, then a single grain of sugar would be a share. The stock would be the title of the share. For example, someone could purchase one hundred shares of sugar stock.

The stock market exists because companies participate. But companies can only participate if consumers purchase shares. One cannot exist without the other. When a company decides to go public, it’s all or nothing. Shareholders will own 100 percent of the company once it is listed on the stock market. They vote on how many shares the company should have. The shares are microscopic fractions of percentages because, if they were valued at 1%, there would only be 100 shares, which would be extremely expensive.

Companies earn money by going public. If consumers buy shares in a company, they will get money based on how well the company does. If they invest money and the company does well, that person can sell the shares at a higher price. But this easy money system also has a downside: if the company does poorly, someone can only sell the stocks for less than what they paid. People have lost millions because of this system.

The main reason that anyone has invested in stocks is that they want to make money. Stocks usually return 7-10% per year over long periods. The longer people are invested in the stock market, the more their money will grow. In the long run, people can make lots of money off the stock market, or they could lose it all in a matter of hours.

Shareholders don’t have to invest in only one company, either. One of J. C. Booth’s STEM teachers, Mr. Bingle, lists the numerous companies he invests in: “I have stock in Delta, AMD, which is a semiconductor company, Norwegian Cruise Line, Carnival Cruise Line, TSM, which is Taiwan semiconductors, Rivian, which is an electric automobile maker, and Riot, which is a company that deals with cryptocurrency.”

Even children can. It’s simple, kids need someone of legal age to do the financial transactions for them, but if a child doesn’t want their parents making the account for them, they can open it as soon as they make taxable income.

“Its highs and lows,” Coach Haselwood, another teacher at J. C. Booth, said. “If you watch the stock market every day, you can make a lot of money one day, then the next day you could lose it all. If you’re in it for the long haul, you shouldn’t watch it daily. You should just let it sit and hopefully by the time you try to get out or the time you want to sell your stock, hopefully, it’s worth the money.”