How to Read a Stock Quote & Market Depth

Before any number, make sure you are reading the right listing. Type "Tata Motors" into a trading app and two different companies come back, both with the Tata mark, both with "Tata Motors" in their names. A search can also return futures and options contracts on a share, which are not the share itself.

The page's identity line names the listing. On NSE it reads TMCV · Tata Motors Limited (INE1TAE01010) · Series: EQ. The symbol, TMCV, is the short name the exchange uses. The ISIN (International Securities Identification Number): show the note on ISIN, INE1TAE01010, is a 12-character code for this one security. The series, EQ, is the code for the rules it trades under: EQ is the normal market, and any other code changes how trades settle, so read chapter 9 before you order one. Check the tab too: Equity, not Derivatives or Option Chain.

Here is why the check matters. In October 2025 the old Tata Motors split in two. Its trucks and buses business became a new company, listed on 12 November 2025: show the note on The split, in dates under the symbol TMCV, with a new ISIN, and it now carries the name Tata Motors Limited. The old listed company kept its ISIN, INE155A01022, and trades as TMPV, Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles Limited: cars, electric cars and Jaguar Land Rover. The famous name moved to the new code; the old code stayed with the cars.

The same check works across exchanges. TMCV also trades on BSE, which keeps its own page, its own scrip code and its own prices, because each exchange has its own book of orders (How a Stock Exchange Works compares two books). The ISIN is the same on both pages: that is how you know they describe one security.

So check the symbol, the ISIN and the exchange before the price, and check that you are on the share, not a contract with the same name.

Open TMCV's page before 9 am on Monday 26 October 2026 and the big number is still Friday's last trade, ₹394.00, under a stamp dated 23 October. It looks like the price now. It is the price of a trade from the last session, three days earlier.

Every quote page carries a stamp. NSE prints "As on 26-Oct-2026 16:00:00 IST: show the note on IST" above its numbers; BSE prints the date and time beside the price. IST is India Standard Time. Everything on the page belongs to that moment unless a field says otherwise.

The page passes through four states. Before the open it shows the last session's numbers; from 9:00 am, in the pre-open auction, the big number becomes an indicative opening price that can change until order entry closes (Market Timings and Auctions). From 9:15 am the page is live: the last price, the high, the low and the order book keep changing, and the close does not exist yet. On Monday TMCV traded everywhere between ₹379.25 and ₹401.50. After the close the last trade stops, the official close appears and every row of the order book shows "-", because nothing is waiting. On a holiday there is no session at all: NSE was shut on Tuesday 20 October 2026 for Dussehra, and the page kept the numbers of Monday 19 October.

A dash is not a zero. It means there is nothing to show: no orders waiting after the close, or no delivery figure for some shares (chapter 9).

Some free websites show prices late: Yahoo Finance lists its BSE quotes as 15 minutes delayed and labels them "Delayed Quote". Before an order, read the price on your broker's live screen during market hours, and remember it can move before your order arrives.

Fields also keep their own clocks. The delivery figure is for a finished day, the 52-week numbers cover a year, the band is today's rule. On a real morning, NSE's page showed that day's pre-open price beside the previous day's delivery figure and the new day's band, all on one screen. Match the moments before you compare or calculate.

LTP, the last traded price, is the price of the latest trade on this exchange: ₹381.90 after Monday's close. It records a deal between two other people. What you could pay now is in the order book (chapter 5).

The previous close is Friday's official close, ₹396.00: the starting point the page measures from (chapter 4).

The open is the day's first price, ₹391.85: ₹4.15 below Friday's close, or −1.05%. Traders call a jump between one close and the next open a gap; reading gaps on a chart is in Charts & Price Action.

The high and low are the day's highest and lowest trades, ₹401.50 and ₹379.25: a range of ₹22.25: show the note on TMCV's range on 26 Oct 2026. They say how far trades reached, not how long any price lasted or which came first. OHLC is the short name for open, high, low and close together.

The close is the official price of the day, and it is not always the last trade. TMCV has no futures and options, so its close is the average price of its trades between 3:00 and 3:30 pm: ₹384.05, ₹2.15 above its last trade. Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles has futures and options, so it closes in an auction, and the trades after it happen at that price: its last trade and close on Monday were both ₹263.70: show the note on TMPV's last trade and close, 26 Oct 2026. How each close is set is in Market Timings and Auctions. Use the close to say how a day ended, and the LTP to say what the last trade was.

During the session the high and low can still move, and the close does not exist yet (chapter 2).

Change is the price now minus a starting price, and change % is that change divided by the starting price, times 100. The page's headline uses the previous close, but your own result is measured from your own price, so name the base before you read the number.

Take one price, Monday's close of ₹384.05, and four bases. From Friday's close of ₹396.00 it is −₹11.95, or −3.02%: the figure the page prints. From the open, ₹391.85, it is −₹7.80, or −1.99%. From the year's high, ₹509.00 on 27 February 2026, it is −₹124.95: show the note on From the 52-week high, or −24.55%. From the lowest trade since the listing, ₹306.30 on 14 November 2025, it is +₹77.75, or +25.38%. Same price; one rise and three falls.

NSE's page itself prints two changes after the close, both from Friday's ₹396.00: −₹14.10 (−3.56%) beside the last trade, ₹381.90, and −₹11.95 (−3.02%) beside the close. Same base, two prices, two answers.

The usual trap is working out your own result from the page's base. Your starting point is the price you paid, not the previous close. Some sites measure the day's change from the open instead of the previous close, so check which base yours uses. A green or red number on a page is never your profit or loss: your price, your quantity and your charges decide that (Brokerage, Charges and Taxes adds the charges).

NSE's page calls it the Order Book: five rows, buyers on the left (Qty · Bid) and sellers on the right (Ask · Qty), with "% Buy · Total Quantity · % Sell" under them. BSE calls it Market Depth. Trading apps usually add how many orders wait at each price, and some offer 20 rows instead of five.

Read the top row first. The best bid is the highest price any buyer is waiting to pay; the best ask (or offer) is the lowest price any seller will accept. The gap between them is the spread, the cost of buying and selling straight back (How a Stock Exchange Works). Picture a moment in Monday's session, on TMCV's real price steps of ₹0.05: show the note on Tick size: best bid ₹384.00 with 640 shares, best ask ₹384.05 with 760 shares. The spread is ₹0.05, one tick.

Now check your quantity. A buyer is served by the asks, a seller by the bids. Maya's 10 shares fit inside the 760 waiting at ₹384.05: ₹3840.50: show the note on Maya's 10 at the best ask for all ten. A fund buying 2000 at once would take those 760, then 1240 at ₹384.10: about ₹384.08 a share on average. Investor.gov puts it plainly: price quotes "are only for a specific number of shares".

Three cautions. First, the five rows are only the top of the book: the totals under them add up every buy and sell order waiting, at any price. Second, if your quantity is bigger than all five ask rows together (6905 shares in this picture), the screen cannot tell you the price you would pay. Third, orders can be changed or cancelled at any moment, so the panel shows what people intend, not what will happen: a bigger buy total does not mean the price will rise.

Where few shares wait at each price, even a small order can reach worse prices; How a Stock Exchange Works shows how far an order walks.

Volume counts the shares that traded: 7823318 TMCV shares on NSE on Monday, about 78 lakh (7.8 million): show the note on Lakh and crore. A trade of 100 shares adds 100, not 200: each trade has a buyer and a seller and is counted once. NSE's page shows volume in lakhs, so Monday's reads 78.23 there.

Traded value is what those trades were worth: about ₹305.10 crore: show the note on TMCV traded on 26 Oct 2026 changed hands between buyers and sellers. None of it went to Tata Motors; the company is paid only when it sells new shares (What Is the Stock Market?).

Trades count the deals: 132876 on Monday, about 59 shares a trade on average.

Delivery says how much of the day's trading ended with shares changing owners: 3415356 of Monday's shares, 43.66%. The rest were bought and sold again within the day by the same person, so they never ended with a new owner; traders call that intraday. Picture 100 shares traded twice: a seller to a day trader in the morning, the day trader to a new owner after lunch. Volume counts 200; only 100 changed owners by the close, so delivery is 50%.

Compare like with like. TMCV's delivery was 50.47% on Friday 23 October and 41.64% on Tuesday 27 October: compare a full day with full days, and during the session compare volume only with the same time on other days. A delivery figure seen during the session is the last finished day's.

Delivery does not say who bought, why, or whether they will hold; every delivered share also had a seller. And volume is not depth: a share can trade lakhs of shares in a day and still have few waiting at one moment.

VWAP, the volume-weighted average price, is the total value of the day's trades divided by the total shares traded. It starts again every session. Brokers' screens and data feeds often call it the average price, or the average traded price (ATP).

Why weighted? Take a made-up day of three trades: 300 shares at ₹380, 100 at ₹390 and 100 at ₹400. VWAP is ₹193000 ÷ 500 = ₹386.00: show the note on The made-up day's VWAP; the plain average of the three prices is ₹390.00. VWAP leans toward the price where most shares traded.

Now the real day: ₹305.10 crore ÷ 7823318 shares = ₹389.99, exactly the VWAP NSE printed for TMCV on Monday. The plain average of the open, high, low and close is ₹389.16. The close, ₹384.05, sat ₹5.94 below VWAP: the last half-hour, which sets TMCV's close, traded well below the day's average.

Large investors such as mutual funds and pension funds use VWAP as a yardstick when they buy or sell in size. A buy above the day's VWAP says only that, on average, that day's shares changed hands at a lower price.

VWAP is not a measure of value: a price below it is only below the day's average price, nothing more. Nor is it anyone's buy price.

The 52-week high and low are the highest and lowest trades of the past year, with their dates. For TMCV on Monday, NSE showed a high of ₹509.00, on 27 February 2026, and a low of ₹306.30, on 14 November 2025. TMCV had been listed for less than a year, so its "year" began at the listing. Monday's close sat 38.4% of the way up that range and 24.5% below the high. The range shows how far the price travelled; it does not say why (What Moves Share Prices) or what comes next.

A 52-week low is not a floor. It is only the lowest trade so far: Tata Motors Passenger Vehicles set a new one on Friday 23 October 2026, ₹259.35.

Monday's own range, ₹22.25, is a sliver inside the year's ₹202.70.

The price band limits the prices at which orders are accepted today. On NSE most shares have bands of 2%, 5%, 10% or 20% either way. TMCV's was 20% on Monday: ₹316.80 to ₹475.20: show the note on TMCV's band on 26 Oct 2026, worked out from Friday's ₹396.00. Shares with futures and options, like TMPV, show "No Band", but NSE still applies an operating range of 10% to stop orders at prices that are not genuine. Many apps call the two ends of a band the upper and lower circuit.

A band does not promise a buyer or a seller. What happens when a share reaches its band, and the market-wide breakers, are in Circuit Limits and Surveillance.

NSE's page prints "Series: EQ" beside TMCV. The series is part of what you are buying: the same company can appear under other codes for other markets, such as the block-deal window.

The codes a beginner meets, from NSE's legend: EQ, shares and ETFs in the normal rolling market; BE, trade-for-trade, used for shares moved there by the exchanges' surveillance reviews; BZ, trade-for-trade for companies that have not met certain listing rules; SM, shares on the platform for smaller companies (SME); and ST and SZ, SME shares in trade-for-trade. Others exist, for InvITs, REITs, gold bonds and government securities; look them up in NSE's legend when you meet one.

In the normal rolling market, a buy and a sale of the same share on one day can net out. In trade-for-trade each trade settles on its own, in full: a buy and a sale on the same day do not cancel out, so each must be paid for or delivered.

TMCV itself started there, from its first day of listing. Its first ten sessions, 12 to 25 November 2025, were in series BE, and its page showed "-" where a delivery percentage usually sits. From 26 November 2025 it traded as EQ, and the delivery figure appeared. The exchanges decide with SEBI: show the note on SEBI which shares move to trade-for-trade, and NSE reviews the list every fortnight and every quarter, so a share's code can change; why a share is moved is in Circuit Limits and Surveillance. The code is a rule about settlement, not a verdict on the company.

Read every quote in the same five questions, in order. One: right share, right exchange, right moment? Symbol, ISIN, series, the Equity tab, the exchange, the stamp. Two: what was the last trade, and up or down from what? LTP, close, previous close and your own base. Three: can my quantity trade near that price? The best bid and ask and the shares waiting, during market hours. Four: how busy was the day? Volume, value, trades, delivery, VWAP. Five: where does today sit, and which limits and rules apply? The year's range, today's band, the series.

A quote cannot tell you whether the business is good, what it is worth, why the price moved or what comes next. Those questions belong to What Moves Share Prices and, from Technical vs Fundamental Analysis onward, to the two kinds of analysis; the chart on the page is Charts & Price Action.

The page has other fields, each taught where it belongs: total and free-float market cap in Market Cap and Stock Categories; face value and adjusted prices in Corporate Actions; the P/E ratio in How to Research a Stock; daily and annualised volatility in Risk Management 101; the margin rate in Margin, Leverage and Pledging. Impact cost is how much worse than the middle of the spread a set order size would trade; the page does not print that size, so this lesson does not read its value. Five answers, in order, tell you what the page records, and nothing more. With them in hand, the next step is the order ticket: what to ask for, at which price, and for how long.