The stock tables keep investors up to date on what's happening in the market.

You can find summaries of trading activity for the previous trading day in the financial pages of major newspapers. Composite transactions for the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) provide combined trading results for stocks listed on that exchange and on regional exchanges in other cities.

Corporations are listed alphabetically — sometimes in shortened versions of their actual name — and followed by their trading symbol. Some symbols are easy to connect to their companies, like GE for General Electric, but others can be less obvious. That often happens when companies have similar names or the logical abbreviation has already been used.

Year to date percentage change (YTD % CHG) reports the percentage increase (+) or decrease (-) in the stock's price since the beginning of the current year. In this example, StorageTek is up 47% and Sherwin Williams is down 1.2%. Percentage change typically varies from day to day as stock prices move up and down.

Highest and lowest stock prices for the past 52 weeks are also reported. When there's a new high or low, it's indicated with an arrow pointing up or down in the left-hand margin. The range between the prices is a measure of the stock's volatility, or price movement. (The more volatile a stock is, the more you can make or lose in a relatively short time.) The stock with the most volatile price here is StrideRite, whose range of movement is from 4.81 to 8.75, about an 82% gain.

Yield percent (YLD %) is one way to evaluate the stock's current value. It states the dividend the company pays as a percentage of the current price. For example, the yield on Realty Income Corporation is 7.9%. That's substantially higher than the yield provided by most other companies.

Percent yield also lets you compare your earnings on a stock with earnings on other investments. But it doesn't tell you your total return, which is the sum of your dividends plus increases (or decreases) in stock price. When there's no dividend, yield can't be calculated, so the column is left blank. That's the case with Reebok.

Cash dividends per share is an estimate of the anticipated yearly dividend per share in dollars and cents. In this example, Nucor's yearly dividend is estimated at 68 cents a share. If you owned 100 shares, you'd receive $68 in dividends, probably in quarterly payments of $17.

Price/earnings ratio (P/E) shows the relationship between a stock's price and the company's earnings for the last four quarters. It's figured by dividing the current price per share by the earnings per share — a number the stock table doesn't provide as a separate piece of information. Here, for example, Reader's Digest's P/E ratio of 15 means its price is 15 times its annual per share earnings.

Since stock investors are interested in earnings, they use P/E ratios to compare the relative value of different stocks. But the P/E ratio reported in this chart, called a trailing P/E, reports past earnings, not future potential. Two companies with the same P/E may face very different futures: One on its way to posting higher earnings and the other headed for a loss.

Those differences may be anticipated in a forward P/E, which stock analysts compute by combining earnings reports for the two most recent quarters with the earnings they expect for the next two.

There's no perfect P/E ratio, though you can use historical averages or current industry averages as a benchmark. Some investors avoid stocks if they think the ratio is too high. However, for others, a small company with a high P/E can be an attractive investment if it seems to promise rapid growth. Value investors, on the other hand, look for stocks with low P/E ratios.

Volume (VOL 100s) refers to the number of shares traded the previous day. Unless a Z appears before the number in this column, multiply by 100 to get the number of shares. (The Z indicates the actual number traded.) An unusually large volume, indicated by underlining, usually means buyers and sellers are reacting to some new information. That's the case with Reader's Digest B stock and StrideRite in the illustrations above.

Last is the final trade price of the day, and Net change (NET CHG) compares that price with the last price of the previous trading day. A minus (-) indicates that the price has fallen, and a plus (+) that it has risen. Here, Nucor is up $2.03 a share and Nuevo Energy is down 22 cents a share. Prices that change 5% or more are in boldface, as New York Magic is.

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