Share price increasing and decreasing.

[Iotrez]

Hi all,

I was wondering what is the average number of company shares that goes up and the average number that goes down over a particular time period. Would it come out at around 50% for each?

Say if someone bought a number of shares at random, is it likely that their portfolio value would hover around the same value because there would likely be roughly the same number of companies going up and down in value?

I know that the value of all the companies in the stock market can go up and down which would affect the value of someone's portfolio. But aside from that would there likely be roughly the same number of companies going up and down in value?

Thanks.

 

[damianoakley]

Hi Iotrez,

Whilst I don't know the answer to your question, I would say that if you want to monitor this, you could check out advfn.com - they display daily "advance/decline" numbers for UK stocks. Cnnfn.com also does a display for U.S. Stocks.

I would say that as well as looking just at the number of stocks advancing and declining, you should be looking at HOW MUCH the stocks are rising or falling by.

If you did as you say and pick a handful of stocks at random and half advanced and the other half declined, you could still end up with a loss if the declining half has fallen more than the advancing half.


Thanks

Damian

 

[andycan]

Lotrez

The answer to your question is yes and no
take this scenario if you bought all the company shares that represented the dow 30 back in 2000 this month 6 year on you would be at breakeven
so to answer your question in this instance its a yes
but not all portfolios are made up of the dow jones industrial average and not everyone bought 6 years ago those that bought the dow for example march 2003 at the low would have had their portfolio increase by 62%
so there is the yes and no answer