What were stocks?
If we went by the definition,
they were securities issued by joint-stock companies to raise funds, given to shareholders as proof of ownership and entitling them to dividends and profit distributions.
That might not have been very intuitive, so put more simply,
someone who started a corporation might suddenly think, I'm an unprecedented business genius. Give me another three hundred and fifty million, and everyone in the entire Jinxi region will be carrying a cannon from Italy.
In short, if they had the idea of getting money from society to expand and strengthen their business,
how would they get that money?
They divided part of the company's ownership into many portions—shares—and sold some of them, obtaining money from the buyers.
The certificates representing those ownership rights were stocks.
As for why people bought their stocks, there were naturally benefits involved.
Buying stocks meant you had contributed money to the company's operations, gained partial ownership, and become one of its investors—shareholders.
If the company made money—for instance, if Resident Evil broke out and cannons from Italy sold incredibly well, with annual sales enough to circle the globe three times—you would naturally get a share of the profits.
But most people did not buy stocks for dividends or profit distributions, and they generally would not live to see that day anyway.
They bought stocks simply to profit from buying low and selling high.
And that behavior—
was called stock speculation.
Those were the basic concepts Fang Ran had just figured out before Veronica came in.
Well, the part about cannons from Italy had been added by him.
"That was about it."
Scrolling through the projected materials he had just looked up, Fang Ran sighed with a headache as he explained his level of understanding in response to Veronica's question.