"What makes stocks go up and down?" The basics of understanding this question is pretty easy to catch on to. We won't lie to you, there are many more factors that contribute to the moving of stock prices but we'll just cover the basics for right now. Okay, let's say you walked into a store and wanted to buy a case of pop. You walked into the store and up to the Coca-Cola display where you usually purchase your cases of pop. To your astonishment, only one case is left on the display and as you are about to grab the case of soda, another man walks up and also wants to purchase it. There is only one case of Coca-Cola so how do you solve this problem? Well, the store owner sees the two of you deciding who will go home with the pop and decides that he can make some money on this and says that he will sell it to whoever offers him more money for it.* The man who arrived after you offers him $4.99 for the case of Coke and you offer him $5.99. The store owner then decides to sell you the case of Coca-Cola because you offered him more money, thus driving the price of pop up for that case. This example is a lot like the stock market. When more people want to buy a certain stock (the case of Coke in our example), the price rises. As more investors want to buy that stock, fewer shares are available to buy so they have to offer higher bids to get shares of stock. Stocks go down for the opposite reasons. When more people want to sell stocks, the prices drop. This would be like if that store owner received too many cases of pop on accident and had to sell them. He would have a sale and offer them cheaper to attract shoppers. People who are trying to sell their stock offer lower prices to try to attract investors interested in buying the stock. The reasons that cause investors to want to buy and sell a certain stock varies. But if a company just announced that they made a lot of money in the previous year, then more investors would want to buy the stock. Likewise, if they announced that they lost a lot of money, more people might want to sell. So next time you see that a stock is up or down, you will know that more investors are trying to buy or sell.