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Investing Lesson 1 - Introduction to the Stock Market

By , About.com Guide

Have you always wanted to know how to understand a company's annual report and financial statements? In this series of lessons, we set out to teach you how to take the financial statements of a company and carefully analyze them to determine what the stock is truly "worth". This allows you make better investing decisions by helping to avoid the costly mistake of purchasing a company when its share price is too high.

Eventually, by reading, printing, and studying these lessons, you will be able to pick up a balance sheet and truly understand what the numbers mean. At the end of each lesson there is a quiz to test your understanding of what you learned.

In this first installment, we are going to look at why the stock market exists and explain how a business goes from being a small, family-owned company to a corporation with publicly traded stock.

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