What Is Share Dealing?

Share dealing is the process of buying and selling shares in publicly listed companies. Bought from a stock exchange via your broker, shares fluctuate in price throughout the course of the trading day, depending on the level of supply and demand for the given share you're trading.

Prices move incrementally for each additional share bought or sold, thus these movements can be vast, for example when large institutional investors sell off or buy up thousands of a particular company's shares.

Because these prices are directly linked to the market demand for a security, that makes it much easier for traders to interpret whether share price is likely to move up or down, say on the strength of a quarterly earnings report or some economic announcement with a bearing on the industry concerned.

In a nutshell, it is this price speculation element of share dealing that makes (and loses) money, and second guessing the market's reaction to particular announcements is key to leveraging these movements in price. While the shares themselves are assets with their own revenue yield in the form of a dividend, most investors (of all sizes) look to capitalize in the shift in value of the shares they trade over time, hoping to close the transaction when the prices move in their favour to lock in a profit, and learning to read the patterns of price movements is one of the core tenets of successful trading.