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The Internet and its reach to mobile phones have provided a way to stay appraised of the prices of any and all stocks, bonds, commodities, and any other financial instruments no matter where you’re located. Read on to discover all about quotes and where to look at them.

What Are Stock Quotes?
Stock quotes are simply the prices that stocks go for at any given time. When you look up quotes in the newspaper, you’re generally given three numbers: bid, ask, and last. The bid price represents the floor on any stock quotes, the ask price represents the ceiling, and the last price represents the last price paid for the stock. The difference between bid and ask quotes is known as the spread of a particular stock, and the difference is pocketed by the stock broker or website that takes care of the transaction. You purchase stock at higher prices and sell it for lower prices.

When you see a single number representing a stock price, generally that number is the average of the bid and ask prices. Stocks go up or down when brokers are willing to pay more or less to buy a stock on any given day. When the stock quote bid/ask spread is very wide, it generally means that a stock has a lot of volatility and could go up or down. What this means for you is that brokers don’t want to risk their money on a volatile stock, so you have to sell it to them for much reduced prices or buy it for much higher prices than it might otherwise be worth.

Where Do I Get Quotes?
We’ve come a long way since the financial section in a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal was the only place to read the latest quotes. Now, depending on how you prefer to connect to the Internet and what you prefer to do with your stock quotes, there are many, many different ways to go.

1. Simple – If you only have money in a relatively small number of stocks, you can simply type their ticker symbol into the Google search engine. Their new instant search option lets you get real-time stock information instantly, so you can glance and check to see if your financials have gone up or down.

2. Mobile – If you have a smartphone, there are any number of a million different stock quote programs you can use to keep track of your stocks. However, if you still have a “dumbphone” or more standard mobile phone, you can still use services like Quotebeep to send you daily texts and keep you appraised of stock prices. Just sign up, let them know what you want to keep track of, and they’ll send the texts.

3. Complex – If you sign up for an online trading account with a financial site like E-trade, you can arrange to receive your stock information any way you like. This is great for the savvy trader, since most financial sites offer access to a wide array of charts, secondary numbers, and other calculations designed to help you make the most of when you buy and sell your stocks. The only downside? It’s so much information! The learning curve can be steep.

History of Quotes
The term “stock quote” used to refer specifically to stock tickers. Invented in 1863, stock tickers were designed to use the telegraph system to send stock prices all over the country. These tickers printed “ticker tape” upon which the latest bid/ask spread was printed, as well as the change since the last printing. People sat around on the stock exchange whose job it was to watch the rise and fall of all the different stocks and type it into stock tickers using Morse code. Prior to this development, there were no such things as “quotes” – traders based their business on aggregated daily summaries. Quotes imply a real-time relationship with the market, which has only been around for about 150 years.