If the thought of investing in the stock market scares you, you are not alone. Individuals with very limited financial experience are either terrified by horror stories of average investors losing 50% of their portfolio value or are beguiled by "hot tips" that bear the promise of huge rewards but seldom pay off. It is not surprising, then, that the pendulum of investment sentiment is said to swing between fear and greed.
The reality is that investing in the stock market carries risk, but when approached in a disciplined manner, it is one of the most efficient ways to build up one's net worth. While the average individual keeps most of their net worth in their home, the affluent and very rich generally have the majority of their wealth invested in stocks.1 In order to understand the mechanics of the stock market, let's begin by delving into the definition of a stock and its different types.
What Is a Stock?
A stock is a financial instrument that represents ownership in a company or corporation and represents a proportionate claim on its assets (what it owns) and earnings (what it generates in profits). Stocks are also called shares or equity.Owning stock means that a shareholder owns a slice of the company equal to the number of shares held as a proportion of the company's total outstanding shares. For instance, an individual or entity that owns 100,000 shares of a company with one million outstanding shares would have a 10% ownership stake in it. Most companies have outstanding shares that run into the millions or billions.
Types of Stock
There are two main types of stock: common shares and preferred shares. The term equities is synonymous with common shares, because their market value and trading volumes are many times larger than those of preferred shares.2
The main distinction between the two is that common shares usually carry voting rights that enable the common shareholder to have a say in corporate meetings and elections, while preferred shares generally do not have voting rights. Preferred shares are so named because preferred shareholders have priority over common shareholders to receive dividends as well as assets in the event of a liquidation.2
Common stock can be further classified in terms of their voting rights. While the basic premise of common shares is that they should have equal voting rights—one vote per share held—some companies have dual or multiple classes of stock with different voting rights attached to each class. In such a dual-class structure, Class A shares may have 10 votes per share, while Class B shares may only have one vote per share. Dual- or multiple-class share structures are designed to enable the founders of a company to control its fortunes, strategic direction, and ability to innovate.3
Why Companies Issue Shares
Many of today's corporate giants started as small private entities launched by a visionary founder a few decades ago. Think of Jack Ma incubating Alibaba (BABA) from his apartment in Hangzhou, China, in 1999, or Mark Zuckerberg founding the earliest version of Facebook (now Meta), from his Harvard University dorm room in 2004.45 Technology giants like these have become among the biggest companies in the world within a couple of decades.
However, growing at such a frenetic pace requires access to a massive amount of capital. In order to make the transition from an idea germinating in an entrepreneur's brain to an operating company, they need to lease an office or factory, hire employees, buy equipment and raw materials, and put in place a sales and distribution network, among other things. These resources require significant amounts of capital, depending on the scale and scope of the business.
Raising Capital
A startup can raise such capital either by selling shares (equity financing) or borrowing money (debt financing). Debt financing can be a problem for a startup because it may have few assets to pledge for a loan—especially in sectors such as technology or biotechnology, where a firm has few tangible assets—plus the interest on the loan would impose a financial burden in the early days, when the company may have no revenues or earnings
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