Read a Stock Quote & Market Depth

Rather than describing fields in the abstract, we will take a single illustrative quote and use it throughout the lesson. Every number below is made up for teaching. It is not a real company, not a real price, and not a comment on any security.

Picture a mid-sized manufacturing company. Here is its quote screen at some moment during a trading session.

Read the table once now without trying to understand it. By the end of this lesson you will come back to it and read the whole thing in about ten seconds.

Notice the structure hiding in there. Some fields describe today (LTP, open, high, low, volume). Some describe how easily you can transact (bid, ask, depth). Some describe the longer picture (52-week range, market cap). And some describe rules that constrain you (circuit limits, series code, lot size). Four different kinds of information on one screen.

These five draw the shape of the session, and their relationship to each other says more than any one of them alone.

LTP (Last Traded Price) is the price of the most recent completed trade — what everyone calls 'the current price'. It is a historical fact, not an offer. You cannot necessarily buy at the LTP; you buy at the ask.

Previous Close is yesterday's official closing price, and it is the reference point for today's change. On the NSE it is a weighted average of the last half hour of trading rather than the final tick, which is why the previous close and yesterday's last price are sometimes slightly different numbers.

Open is the first traded price of today's session, set through a pre-open call auction. The gap between the previous close and the open is where overnight news gets priced in. In our example, previous close ₹482.60 and open ₹486.00 means the stock gapped up ₹3.40 before a single ordinary order was matched.

High and Low are today's extremes, and High minus Low is the day's range — ₹497.80 minus ₹484.25 gives a range of ₹13.55, or about 2.8 percent of the price. A wide range means an active, volatile session; a narrow one means a quiet, coiled session.

Now read them together. LTP ₹495.40 sits at ₹11.15 above the low and only ₹2.40 below the high — in the top fifth of the day's range. Buyers have held the advantage all session. Had the LTP been sitting a rupee off the low, the same headline gain would tell a completely different story.

Change measures the distance travelled from the previous close, shown both in rupees and as a percentage. In our example, ₹495.40 minus ₹482.60 gives +₹12.80, and ₹12.80 divided by ₹482.60 gives +2.65 percent.

The rupee figure is close to useless on its own. A ₹10 move is a 10 percent event in a ₹100 stock and a 0.4 percent non-event in a ₹2,500 stock. The same rupee number describes a dramatic day and a boring one.

The percentage is the comparable unit. It lets you rank moves across stocks, compare a stock's move against its index, and judge whether something unusual is happening.

One habit worth building early: compare the stock's percentage change against the broad index the same day. A stock up 2.65 percent on a day the index is up 2.4 percent has done almost nothing special. The same 2.65 percent on a day the index is down 1 percent is a genuinely strong relative move.

And a caution. Percentage change is measured from the previous close, so on a day with a large opening gap the number can be misleading about the session itself. Our stock is up 2.65 percent from the previous close, but from its own open of ₹486.00 it is up only 1.93 percent — most of the gain arrived before regular trading began.

The Bid is the highest price any buyer is currently willing to pay. The Ask (or Offer) is the lowest price any seller is currently willing to accept. The gap between them is the spread.

This pair matters more than the LTP for one practical reason: when you buy at market, you pay the ask, and when you sell at market, you receive the bid. The LTP is history. Bid and ask are what is actually available to you right now.

In our example the bid is ₹495.35 and the ask is ₹495.50 — a spread of 15 paise, or 0.03 percent of the price. Buy and immediately sell at market and you lose that 0.03 percent before any charges. That is a rounding error, and it tells you this stock is liquid.

Compare that with a thinly traded small-cap showing a bid of ₹142 and an ask of ₹148. The spread is ₹6, which is 4.2 percent of the price. Buy and immediately sell and you have lost 4.2 percent for nothing. The stock must move more than 4 percent in your favour before you break even on the spread alone.

So the spread is two things at once: a hidden transaction cost you pay on every round trip, and the single fastest liquidity check on the screen. Before anything else on a stock you have not traded before, look at the spread as a percentage of price.

Market depth — the five-level order book — shows the pending orders stacked at prices around the current market, not merely the best bid and ask. It is the closest thing you get to seeing supply and demand as they actually exist right now.

The buy side lists bids descending from the best price; the sell side lists asks ascending. Each level shows a price, a quantity, and usually the number of separate orders making up that quantity. That last column matters: 5,000 shares from one order is a different situation from 5,000 shares spread across sixty orders.

Depth is what tells you whether your intended order size is reasonable. If you plan to buy 2,000 shares and the five visible ask levels together hold 5,880 shares, a market order will walk through several levels and your average price will be meaningfully above the best ask. If you plan to buy 100, you will fill at the top level and nothing will move.

The screen also shows Total Buy Quantity and Total Sell Quantity — every pending order in the book, not only the five visible levels. In our example, 3,42,180 shares are waiting to buy against 2,18,640 waiting to sell.

Resist the obvious conclusion. It is tempting to read more buyers than sellers as bullish, and beginners do exactly that. But these are unexecuted intentions, they can be cancelled in a millisecond, large orders are sometimes placed with no intention of filling, and orders far from the market are counted equally with orders at the touch. Treat it as weak context, never as a signal.

Volume is the number of shares traded so far today. On its own the number means nothing — 8,42,000 shares is enormous for one company and trivial for another. It only becomes information when compared with the stock's own average volume.

The comparison is what carries the message. A breakout on three times the average volume has real participation behind it. The identical price move on a third of average volume is a handful of trades pushing a thin book around, and it reverses far more often.

Value traded is the same information in rupees — volume multiplied by the prices at which it traded. In our example, 8,42,000 shares at a VWAP of ₹489.75 gives roughly ₹41.2 crore of turnover. Value is the more honest liquidity measure when you compare across stocks, because a ₹50 stock and a ₹5,000 stock produce wildly different share counts for the same money.

Delivery percentage goes one layer deeper. It measures how much of the day's traded volume was actually taken into demat accounts rather than bought and sold within the same session. Our example shows 41.2 percent, meaning roughly two of every five shares traded were paid for in full and carried home.

A high delivery percentage suggests buyers who are settling up rather than flipping — money committing rather than money churning. A low figure suggests a session dominated by intraday activity. Neither is good or bad by itself, but a strong price move on high volume and high delivery is a very different animal from the same move on high volume and 8 percent delivery.

One practical note: exchanges publish delivery data after the session, so the figure you see on a live screen is almost always the previous day's. Do not read it as today's behaviour.

VWAP (Volume Weighted Average Price) is the average price of every share traded today, weighted by the volume at each price. It is not the midpoint of the high and low — it is pulled toward wherever the most shares actually changed hands.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Multiply each trade's price by its quantity, add all of those up, and divide by total quantity. If 6,00,000 shares traded around ₹487 and 2,42,000 traded around ₹497, the average sits nearer ₹487 because that is where the money was.

Institutions use VWAP as an execution benchmark. A fund manager buying a large position over the day compares their average fill against the day's VWAP to judge whether the execution was good or clumsy. That is why large orders often cluster around it.

For you, it is a simple reference for the session's balance of power. Price above VWAP means the average participant today is currently sitting on a gain, and buyers have had the upper hand. Price below VWAP means the reverse. Our example's LTP of ₹495.40 against a VWAP of ₹489.75 puts the price ₹5.65 — about 1.15 percent — above the session's centre of gravity.

Treat it as description, not prediction. VWAP tells you where the day's trading has been concentrated relative to where price is now. It says nothing about tomorrow, and it resets to nothing at the next session's open.

The 52-week high and low are the highest and lowest prices the stock has traded in the past year. They are the widest useful context on the quote screen — a single glance at where price sits inside that band tells you what regime the stock has been in.

In our example the range runs from ₹388.50 to ₹612.00, and the price is ₹495.40. That puts it 27.5 percent above its 52-week low and 19.1 percent below its 52-week high — roughly 47.8 percent of the way up the band. Neither near a peak nor near a floor. Squarely in the middle, which usually means a stock that has been going sideways or is midway through recovering from a fall.

The two edges carry different meanings. A price sitting a few percent below its 52-week high means the stock has spent the year in an uptrend and there are relatively few holders sitting on losses. A price hovering near the 52-week low means a year of decline, and a large body of holders who bought higher and may sell into any bounce.

That second point is the practically useful one, and it is pure price-action reasoning rather than any indicator. The prices where a stock has traded heavily in the past are the prices where people are waiting — to break even, to add, or to escape. That is why old highs and lows behave as resistance and support.

Two warnings. First, the range shifts every day as old prices roll out of the twelve-month window, so a stock can 'make a new 52-week high' partly because a high from thirteen months ago dropped out. Second, a stock near its 52-week low is not automatically cheap and one near its high is not automatically expensive. The band is context about behaviour, not a valuation.

Every stock has a price band for the day, calculated from the previous close. It is a hard boundary: no trade can happen outside it. The upper edge is the upper circuit and the lower edge is the lower circuit.

In our example the previous close was ₹482.60 and the band is 10 percent, giving an upper circuit of ₹530.86 and a lower circuit of ₹434.34. Any order priced outside those two numbers is rejected outright — this is one of the most common causes of the 'price out of range' message.

Band widths vary. Exchanges apply 2, 5, 10 or 20 percent bands depending on the security, and stocks on which derivatives trade do not carry the same fixed band — they operate under a dynamic price band that can be flexed during the session. Stocks placed under surveillance frameworks often have their bands tightened. The band shown on your own quote screen is the one that applies.

Here is why this field matters far more than beginners think. When a stock is locked at its upper circuit, only buy orders remain — there are no sellers, so a buyer cannot get filled. When it is locked at the lower circuit, only sell orders remain — there are no buyers, so a holder cannot get out at any price.

Read that last sentence again. A lower circuit is not a slow decline you can react to. It is a closed door. Your stop-loss does not help, because a stop-loss needs a buyer on the other side and there is none. The position simply stays yours until the stock opens again, which may be the next day and several percent lower.

This is also the reason a leveraged position in a circuit-prone stock is a fundamentally different risk from an unleveraged one — a topic the margin lesson takes up properly.

Three fields sit near the bottom of most quote screens and get ignored. Each answers a question that comes up later.

Lot size applies to derivatives. Futures and options do not trade in single shares — they trade in fixed lots, and our illustrative stock has a lot size of 1,100. That means the smallest possible futures position is 1,100 shares' worth of exposure, which at ₹495.40 is a contract value of about ₹5.45 lakh. Exchanges periodically revise lot sizes so that contract values stay within a prescribed range, so the number changes over time.

This is the field that quietly tells a beginner that derivatives are not a smaller version of equity. In the cash market you can buy one share for ₹495. In derivatives on the same stock, the minimum unit is a multiple of lakhs of rupees of exposure.

Face value is the nominal value assigned to a share — commonly ₹1, ₹2, ₹5 or ₹10. It has nothing to do with market price. Our example shows ₹2 against a market price of ₹495.40. It matters in two places: dividends are often declared as a percentage of face value rather than of market price, and a stock split changes the face value proportionally.

A worked example makes the dividend point concrete. A '250 percent dividend' on a ₹2 face value is 250 percent of ₹2, which is ₹5 per share — not 250 percent of anything you paid. Against a ₹495.40 price, that ₹5 is a yield of roughly 1.0 percent. The headline percentage sounds enormous and the actual payout is modest, and this trips up beginners every single results season.

Market capitalisation is the price multiplied by the total number of shares outstanding — ₹18,400 crore in our example. It is the market's price for the whole company, and it is what places a stock in the large-, mid- or small-cap bucket. A price of ₹495 tells you nothing about company size on its own; only market cap does.

Two letters next to the ticker decide what you are allowed to do with the stock. Most beginners never notice them, and then cannot understand why an intraday order was rejected.

EQ is the normal rolling settlement series and covers the overwhelming majority of stocks you will look at. Intraday trading is permitted, standard price bands apply, and everything works the way this lesson has described.

BE stands for Book Entry, and it is the trade-to-trade series on the NSE. Every trade must be settled by delivery — you cannot buy and sell the same share on the same day. If you place an intraday order in a BE stock it will be rejected. Price bands are usually tighter as well.

BZ is also trade-to-trade, applied to securities that have fallen foul of compliance or surveillance requirements. The presence of BZ next to a ticker is itself a signal to slow down and read why.

On the BSE the equivalent concept is the T group, which is that exchange's trade-to-trade segment. The label differs, the restriction is the same: delivery only, no intraday.

Separately from the series code, exchanges run surveillance frameworks — ASM (Additional Surveillance Measure) and GSM (Graded Surveillance Measure) — that apply extra restrictions to specific stocks: higher margins, tighter price bands, periodic call auctions instead of continuous trading, or a move to trade-to-trade. A stock can be in EQ series and still be under ASM. Your quote screen or the exchange's own list will say so.

The practical rule is short. If the code beside the ticker is anything other than EQ, or the stock carries a surveillance tag, find out what that means before you place an order — not after it is rejected.

Now go back to the quote from section one and read it as one thing. The trained sequence runs in a fixed order, and it takes about ten seconds.

First, can I transact here? Spread of 15 paise on ₹495 is 0.03 percent, depth is healthy at every level, and turnover is ₹41.2 crore. Yes — this stock is liquid enough that my orders will behave predictably.

Second, what are the rules? Series EQ, so no trade-to-trade restriction and intraday is permitted. Circuit band ₹434.34 to ₹530.86, and the price is nowhere near either edge. Nothing constrains me today.

Third, what happened? Up 2.65 percent from the previous close, but only 1.93 percent from the open, so a chunk of the move came overnight. LTP sits in the top fifth of the day's range and above VWAP, so buyers held the session. Turnover well above the stock's own average, and the previous session's delivery was 41.2 percent, so the participation looks real rather than pure churn.

Fourth, where does this sit in the bigger picture? Roughly 48 percent of the way up a 52-week band, 19 percent below the high and 27 percent above the low. Market cap ₹18,400 crore places it in the mid-cap range.

That is the whole screen in four questions. Notice what the sequence does: it checks whether you can act before it looks at what happened. Beginners do it in the opposite order, get excited by a green number, and only discover the spread and the circuit band after they are stuck.

One final and important note. Everything in this lesson describes how to read information. Reading a quote well does not tell you what will happen next, and no combination of these fields predicts a price. Markets carry real risk, prices fall as easily as they rise, and this is education about the screen — not advice to buy or sell anything.