Common Shares
Common shares will often pay out a portion of the earnings as dividends. The dividend yield is the total dollars (Yen, etc.) paid in a year divided by the spot price of the shares. Most web sites and reports are updated with the expected future year's payments, not the past year's.
The price/earnings ratio quoted for common shares is the reciprocal of what is called the earnings yield. EarningsPerShare / SharePrice.
Read more about this topic: Yield (finance)
Famous quotes containing the words common and/or shares:
“The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are reminiscent,—others merely sensible, as the phrase is,—others prophetic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the wind carries a cry which is meaningful to human ears, it is simpler to believe the wind shares with us some part of the emotion of Being than that the mysteries of a hurricane’s rising murmur reduce to no more than the random collision of insensate molecules.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)