Stock also known as "equity" is a financial instrument indicating ownership in a company giving one access to lay claim on the company’s assets and earnings. Trading on the other hand is simply the act of buying and selling securities, in this case, stocks.

How does Stocks Trading Work?

You invest in stocks by purchasing shares of the stock. For example, a company might have one million outstanding shares and you purchase one hundred of that, this means you have a 10% ownership stake in that company. You can choose to hold on to your shares and earn returns from dividends paid by the company (if they pay them) or by trading all or part of your shares at a higher price than you purchased them.

Dividends are payments made by a company to share profits with its shareholders. Not all stocks pay dividends but for those who do it is paid per share. That is, if you have 15 shares of a company’s stock and it pays dividends worth $2, your total dividend payment will be $2 dividend per share * 15 shares = $30

Some Common Terms

• Orders: This refers to requests made by users to buy or sell shares of a stock. Indicating if it’s a buy or sell is passed in the side attribute
• Stock Ticker or Symbol: A unique series of letters used to describe a company’s stock in shorthand form. It is used on the Embed API to identify a stock asset to trade . For example, apple stock symbol is AAPL
• Quantity: Used to indicate the quantity to be bought or sold in an order request

Trading Stocks with Embed

The Embed API gives you access to trade US stocks (stocks of other countries will be added soon). You will need to interact with the /stocks resource in your integration to make it available to your users.

The stocks trading endpoint on the embed API currently makes provision for basic trading activities, buy and sell only.

Take a look here for guides on making API requests.