Articles and explainers on Indian equity markets.
The price-to-earnings ratio tells you how many rupees you are paying today for one rupee of a company's annual profit. A stock at ₹600 earning ₹20 per share has a P/E of 30: thirty rupees of price for each rupee of earnings.
A stock market is a regulated marketplace where people buy and sell small ownership shares in companies. When you buy one share of Reliance, you own a genuine, if tiny, slice of the business — its factories, its profits, its losses.
A share price is not set by the company, the exchange, or anyone else. It is simply the price of the most recent trade that cleared — the moment a buyer and a seller agreed.
When a headline says the market rose today, it means one number went up — usually the Sensex or the Nifty 50. Both are weighted averages of a small selection of large companies, so "the market" in that sentence is thirty or fifty businesses, weighted by size, standing in for several thousand listed…
A company's results come in three statements, and each answers a different question. The profit and loss statement asks whether the business earned anything. The balance sheet asks what it owns and what it owes. The cash flow statement asks whether money actually arrived.
