By: Michael E. Martinez

To keep track of your stocks, you should be able to read stock quotes from either the Internet or from the newspaper. Tables for the two major U.S. stock exchanges, the NYSE, NASDAQ and AMEX. The information contains consolidated trading which also includes trading on regional exchanges and over the counter (OTC) markets.

It's not always easy to locate a particular stock because the names are usually abbreviated. The abbreviation systems are used by the AP and United Press International, stocks like IBM and AT&T are easy to find, but Corning is listed GLW, and Genentech is DNA.

The annual dividend is listed as Div. in some occasions. It's an estimate based on the most recent quarterly dividend multiplied by four. Dividends are listed by dollars per share. Yield is listed as YID% most times, this is the current dividend divided by the latest closing price rounded off to the nearest tenth of a percent.

The P/E ratio is the price/ earnings ratio that is the latest price divided by the last 12 months earnings per share rounded to the nearest whole number. The next column in the paper is the volume; this is the number of shares trading hands each session, normally listed in hundreds of shares.

The High and Low columns give the highest and lowest prices during the trading session. The next column tells the closing price at which where the stock ended the day. The net change is the percentage in price per share change from the previous session. The 52 week high and low columns gives you the annual trading range, the highest and lowest prices of the previous 52 weeks plus the current trading week.