What’s the difference between stocks and shares?
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Microsoft is a company.
MSFT is the symbol for Microsoft’s stock, which represents the total investable portion of Microsoft the company, in other words, all the parts of the company which can be bought and sold by anyone.
The stock is sliced up into billions of shares. Each share is a tiny slice of the total stock and thus represents a tiny slice of ownership of the company.
As of today, one share of MSFT, i.e. one unit of investment, is worth about $245. If you buy 10 shares of MSFT stock, you’ll own about $2450 worth.
There are about 7.45 billion shares of MSFT stock in existence. That means the market capitalization (market cap), or the theoretical value of Microsoft the company based on the number of shares times the price per share, is about 7.45 billion x $245 = $1.84 trillion.
That doesn’t mean Microsoft could cash out today and get $1.84 trillion or that the company’s assets are worth that much, just that it’s the theoretical value of their stock if everyone sold their shares at the current price. If everyone went out and tried to sell their MSFT shares right now, there would be lots of sellers and few or no buyers, so the supply would exceed the demand, and so the share price would rapidly plummet towards zero.
Stocks are like a books. Shares are like pages. Buying a share is like buying a page of a book.
This is a stock: https://images.app.goo.gl/x4Q7FhVn9s5xqsYW6
This is a share: https://images.app.goo.gl/Fu1aW1ucURPZMtUD7
Let’s say a bag of skittles is labeled Amazon. Thats the stock.
You take 4 little skittles out, now you have 4 shares of Amazon.
Shares are individuals units of a company’s stock. You’d buy X shares of XYZ Co stock. Stocks would be a term more referring to an investment category (I’m invested in stocks, but not bonds) or a portfolio (my stocks are down this year)
A stock is the whole pizza pie. A share is a slice of the pie 🍕. You can buy many shares of 1 stock.
Funnily enough I think it’s just: Stocks (Americans tend to say) vs Shares (UK tends to say)
I think it’s just American vs British English. There is no difference in translation between the two terms in my language (Italian), they are the same
Stock represents the ownership of a publicly traded company. Think of the stock itself as a pizza that the company has already cut up into individual slices (shares) for people to buy. If the pizza was cut into 8 slices, you can buy one, or you can buy more, but the transaction will be in terms of slices.*
You might say “I own stock in company X” in the same way you’d say “I am having pizza for dinner”, even though you can only actually lay claim to your individual slice/share.
*You actually *can* buy fractional shares — one piece of pepperoni — via investment vehicles like mutual funds or ETFs, but that’s a separate discussion!
They both describe “a tradable security that represents a portion of ownership in a company” generally, shares are uses to talk about larger trades such as when a single entity own 20% of a company, they have considerable voting powers. However, the Ossie twosie trades that happen between traders or purchased just to have a few hundred dollars in something, are generally called stocks.
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