Learn the market. Not the noise.

A stock exchange is a marketplace. When you tap Buy in your broker’s app, your order travels to the exchange, where it is matched against someone else’s sell order at an agreed price. Your broker is the messenger; the exchange is the meeting place; the clearing corporation makes sure both sides actually deliver.

Two things follow from this. A share price is not a fact handed down from the company — it is simply the price at which the last buyer and seller agreed. And liquidity matters: in a thinly traded stock, there may be nobody on the other side at the price you want.

A trend is a series of higher highs and higher lows, or the reverse. Volume adds context: a move carried on strong participation can mean something different from a move on thin trading.

Neither guarantees what comes next. A chart describes what has happened and what other participants are currently willing to pay. Define your risk before you interpret any signal.

Profit and cash are not the same thing. A company can report a profit while cash leaves the building, and it can be cash-rich in a loss-making year.

• Operating cash flow — cash the business itself generates.
• Investing cash flow — what it spends on long-lived assets.
• Financing cash flow — borrowing, repayment and returns to shareholders.

Read all three together, across several years rather than a single quarter. One weak quarter is noise; a three-year pattern is information.

Interest rates shape borrowing costs and the discount rate applied to future cash flows. When rates rise, cash expected far in the future is worth less today, which is why long-duration growth stocks tend to react most.

Inflation changes purchasing power and business costs — and changes them unevenly across sectors. Markets respond to expectations as much as to the announcement itself, so a headline on its own rarely explains a day’s move.