Chapter 1 of 7 · 6 min read
Start here. What a share of stock actually is, how the Philippine Stock Exchange and the PSEi work, and what every number next to a ticker means.
What you'll learn
Key terms in this chapter
In one sentence: a stock is a small ownership slice of a real company, and the Philippine Stock Exchange is the continuous auction where those slices change hands at a price nobody sets on purpose.
A share of stock is a tiny slice of ownership in a real company. If a company has, say, a billion shares outstanding and you own one, you technically own a one-billionth slice of it: of its stores or factories, its profit, and its say in how it's run. Buy a whole board lot and you own that many times more.
Owning a share generally comes with three things:
That last point is worth sitting with. Shareholders are last in line. It is the reason a share can go to zero while the company's lenders still get paid, and it is the clearest single explanation of why stocks are riskier than a savings account.
The “stock market”, the Philippine Stock Exchange, or PSE, is simply where those slices change hands. Think of it as one continuous auction: buyers say what they're willing to pay, sellers say what they'll accept, and a trade happens the instant the two sides agree on a price. Nobody sets that price by decree. It moves because what buyers and sellers are willing to do keeps changing, thousands of times a day.
The PSE is the only stock exchange in the country, and it only takes orders during PSE trading hours, Monday to Friday, with a lunch recess in the middle and a short pre-close window before it shuts for the day. Outside those hours, whatever price you see anywhere, including on PSEye, is simply the last one recorded, not a live number still moving.
Every listed company sits under one PSE sector such as Financials, Property, or Industrial, and the exchange tracks the overall market through the PSEi, a weighted average of roughly 30 of the largest, most heavily traded companies. When a headline says “the market was up today,” it almost always means the PSEi moved up, not that every single listed stock did. Browse the full sector breakdown on the sectors page.
A listed company can also be temporarily suspended from trading, usually while it discloses material news or resolves a compliance issue. A suspension halts trading, it doesn't cancel your ownership, and PSEye shows a suspended stock's price as “N/A” rather than guessing or freezing on a stale number.
A handful of numbers show up next to almost every stock, on PSEye and on your broker's platform alike. Knowing what each one means before your first order makes the rest of this guide, and every stock page on this site, much easier to read.
A short code, usually a handful of letters, standing in for a company's full name. Search any of the 282 tracked companies by name or ticker from the full stock list or the Explorer.
The last traded price, and how far that is from the previous day's close. PSEye colors a gain green and a loss red, the same up/down convention most brokers use.
Volume is how many shares changed hands today; value is the peso amount those trades were worth. Value is the more useful number for comparing activity across stocks at very different prices.
Market cap is a company's total value on the exchange (price times shares outstanding). Free float is the percentage of those shares actually available for public trading, rather than locked up by a controlling owner.
The highest and lowest closing price a stock has recorded over the trailing year, a quick reference for how far today's price sits from its recent extremes.
Say a stock page shows ₱38.50, up 1.32%, on 2.1 million shares worth ₱80.9 million, with a market cap of ₱152 billion and a 52-week range of ₱31.00 to ₱44.80. Read left to right, that says: the last trade happened at ₱38.50, which is about ₱0.50 above yesterday's close; roughly ₱81 million actually changed hands today, so this is a stock you could realistically buy or sell without moving the price much; the whole company is valued at ₱152 billion; and today's ₱38.50 sits closer to the top of where it has traded all year than the bottom. None of that tells you whether it is a good buy. It tells you what you are looking at.
The figures above are an illustrative example, not a real company's quote. To read a live one, open any company from the full stock list.
Good to know
The PSEi is the exchange's benchmark index, a weighted average of roughly 30 of the largest, most-traded companies, used as shorthand for how the overall market is doing. A headline saying the PSEi rose or fell tells you nothing directly about any one stock you own outside that list, though it's useful context for the general mood of the market. See the PSEi glossary entry →
You still own them. A trading suspension halts buying and selling, it doesn't cancel existing ownership. You simply can't trade that stock until PSE lifts the suspension, which can take anywhere from a day to much longer depending on the reason. See the Suspended glossary entry →
This guide is general information, not personalized advice. More on what PSEye is and isn't.