What is a share?

A slice of a business

One business, cut into a hundred equal slices. Owning a slice is owning that fraction of the whole thing, and the slices in the picture that are shaded are yours.

A business makes money selling things: coffee, cars, software. Some businesses are cut into equal slices, and the slices are sold to anyone who wants one.

When you buy a slice, you own that piece of the business. You did not lend the business money, and nobody promises to buy the slice back. You own a piece, and that is the whole arrangement.

If the business does well, people may pay more for your slice than you did, because a piece of a thriving thing is worth having. They may not: a price can fall even when the business is doing well. If it does badly, your slice is worth less, and there is no rule that says it must come back.

Everything else in this book - the numbers, the pictures, the rules - is people deciding, all day long, what a slice of some business should cost today.

Said with a food truck

Your friend runs a food truck and wants a second truck. She cannot afford it alone, so she cuts her business into a hundred paper slips and sells forty of them at fifty dollars each. You take two.

You now own two hundredths of a food-truck business. When the trucks thrive, people offer you more than you paid for a slip. When a truck sits broken for a month, nobody wants your slips at any number you would accept. Nothing about the slip itself changed - what changed is what the business behind it looks like.

That is the first step. The next chapter asks what it means for a slice to "cost" anything - who decides, and how.

Nothing here is advice. The whole ladder is on one page; the app behind it is free to start - the door opens to any address. Education only. Pumpstradamus is a paper trading app: no real money is traded, and we are not a broker or an adviser.