Investor Education
Stock Market Basics: How Do Investors Choose Stocks?
Basics of Stock Trading: How Do Investors Choose Stocks?
You’ve likely heard about the recent drama involving GameStop, but unless you’re familiar with how the stock market works, the intricacies of what’s going on may have been lost on you.
And if that’s the case, we don’t blame you—the world of investing can feel like an intimidating place, especially if you’re relatively new to the scene. So for those looking to learn the basics of stock trading, this video by TED-Ed is a good place to start.
We touch on some key takeaways from the video below, like why stock prices fluctuate, how investors choose which stocks to purchase, and differences between active and passive investing.
Stocks, and Why Prices Fluctuate
If you’re still reading this, we’re going to assume you’re fairly unfamiliar with the world of stocks. So let’s start with the basics—what even is a stock?
A stock is a partial share of ownership in a company. Units of stock are called “shares,” and these are mostly traded on stock exchanges, like the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or Nasdaq.
The price of a stock is determined by supply and demand, or the number of buyers versus sellers. When there are more buyers than sellers, the price increases. On the flipside, if there are more sellers than buyers, the price goes down.
Essentially, a company’s stock price is a reflection of how much investors think a company (or a portion of a company) is worth. That’s why a company doesn’t actually need to make profit to be valued by the market—investors simply need to have faith that it’ll become profitable eventually.
Because of the speculative nature of stocks, prices can fluctuate quickly and drastically, depending on public perceptions.
Passive Investors vs. Active Investors
So how do investors choose which stocks to purchase? Well, there are two main styles of investing—active and passive:
- Active investors try to beat the market by purchasing shares they believe are undervalued, with the intent to sell once price goes up
- Passive investors track the market, and tend to hold onto their stocks with the belief that over time, their value will increase
In the U.S., there’s a fairly even number of passive versus active investors—in 2019, about 45% of assets in U.S. stock funds were managed passively.
And while active investors have the potential to make a lot more money, passive investments have generally shown higher returns in the last decade.
Active Investors: Picking a Stock
Despite the risk involved (or perhaps because of it) many investors choose to actively manage their stocks. To assess a company’s potential value, and ultimately find undervalued stocks, an active investor may:
- Investigate a company’s business operations
- Review its financial statements
- Track price trends, with the goal of finding a company that’s undervalued
An active investor may also choose to put money in one or more actively-managed funds, or simply hire a financial planner to do the work on their behalf.
Finding your Comfort Zone
Since there are pros and cons to both styles of investing, how you decide to invest, and where you fall on the investment continuum, ultimately depends on your expectations, risk tolerance, and long-term goals.
It’s also worth noting that these investment styles aren’t mutually exclusive—a combination of both can be used in order to cover all your bases.
Technology
Thematic Investing: 3 Key Trends in Cybersecurity
Cyberattacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated. Here’s what investors need to know about the future of cybersecurity.


Thematic Investing: 3 Key Trends in Cybersecurity
In 2020, the global cost of cybercrime was estimated to be around $945 billion, according to McAfee.
It’s likely even higher today, as multiple sources have recorded an increase in the frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks during the pandemic.
In this infographic from Global X ETFs, we highlight three major trends that are shaping the future of the cybersecurity industry that investors need to know.
Trend 1: Increasing Costs
Research from IBM determined that the average data breach cost businesses $4.2 million in 2021, up from $3.6 million in 2017. The following table breaks this figure into four components:
Cost Component | Value ($) |
---|---|
Cost of lost business | $1.6M |
Detection and escalation | $1.2M |
Post breach response | $1.1M |
Notification | $0.3M |
Total | $4.2M |
The greatest cost of a data breach is lost business, which results from system downtimes, reputational losses, and lost customers. Second is detection and escalation, including investigative activities, audit services, and communications to stakeholders.
Post breach response includes costs such as legal expenditures, issuing new accounts or credit cards (in the case of financial institutions), and other monitoring services. Lastly, notification refers to the cost of notifying regulators, stakeholders, and other third parties.
To stay ahead of these rising costs, businesses are placing more emphasis on cybersecurity. For example, Microsoft announced in September 2021 that it would quadruple its cybersecurity investments to $20 billion over the next five years.
Trend 2: Remote Work Opens New Vulnerabilities
According to IBM, companies that rely more on remote work experience greater losses from data breaches. For companies where 81 to 100% of employees were remote, the average cost of a data breach was $5.5 million (2021). This dropped to $3.7 million for companies that had under 10% of employees working from home.
A major reason for this gap is that work-from-home setups are typically less secure. Phishing attacks surged in 2021, taking advantage of the fact that many employees access corporate systems through their personal devices.
Type of Attack | Number of attacks in 2020 | Number of attacks in 2021 | Growth (%) |
---|---|---|---|
Spam phishing | 1.5M | 10.1M | +573% |
Credential phishing | 5.5M | 6.2M | +13% |
As detected by Trend Micro’s Cloud App Security.
Spam phishing refers to “fake” emails that trick users by impersonating company management. They can include malicious links that download ransomware onto the users device. Credential phishing is similar in concept, though the goal is to steal a person’s account credentials.
A tactic you may have seen before is the Amazon scam, where senders impersonate Amazon and convince users to update their payment methods. This strategy could also be used to gain access to a company’s internal systems.
Trend 3: AI Can Reduce the Cost of a Data Breach
AI-based cybersecurity can detect and respond to cyberattacks without any human intervention. When fully deployed, IBM measured a 20% reduction in the time it takes to identify and contain a breach. It also resulted in cost savings upwards of 60%.
A prominent user of AI-based cybersecurity is Google, which uses machine learning to detect phishing attacks within Gmail.
Machine learning helps Gmail block spam and phishing messages from showing up in your inbox with over 99.9% accuracy. This is huge, given that 50-70% of messages that Gmail receives are spam.
– Andy Wen, Google
As cybercrime escalates, Acumen Research and Consulting believes the market for AI-based security solutions will reach $134 billion by 2030, up from $15 billion in 2021.
Introducing the Global X Cybersecurity ETF
The Global X Cybersecurity ETF (Ticker: BUG) seeks to provide investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the Indxx Cybersecurity Index. See below for industry and country-level breakdowns, as of June 2022.
Sector (By security type) | Weight |
---|---|
Cloud | 28.0% |
Network | 25.1% |
Identity | 17.7% |
Internet | 15.0% |
Endpoint | 12.8% |
Country | Weight |
---|---|
🇺🇸 U.S. | 71.6% |
🇮🇱 Israel | 13.2% |
🇬🇧 UK | 8.2% |
🇯🇵 Japan | 5.5% |
🇰🇷 South Korea | 0.9% |
🇨🇦 Canada | 0.6% |
Totals may not equal 100% due to rounding.
Investors can use this passively managed solution to gain exposure to the rising adoption of cybersecurity technologies.

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