buy! sell! buy! sell! nasdaq!

Have you ever played Pit?

Here is the knowledge I learned in my senior year of High School.
It basically is a supply/demand thing. The more people buying shares  == more the share is worth, the more people selling shares == less the share is worth.
You can buy shares solo, I think yahoo offers a service for it, or you can go through a business who solely buys/sells stocks for you. You give them money and they invest in what they believe would maximize your profit (of course they take a share)

 It really is kinda stupid but I have a friend who invested in apple a few years ago and if he sold now he could potentially make over a thousand dollars on his original investment so maybe it is a thing to do if you understand how markets work?

one went up 10 cents from yesterday. does that mean if i bought 1,000 shares yesterday and sold them today i'd have made $100 in a day?

essentially yes.

also this isn't any different than putting my money in the bank and having them ride the stock market for me at a much lower return.

not really but its riskier so the return is higher. its essentially gambling

what's it based on originally? ownership of capital?

no clue.

why a company would want to be publicly traded

well I'm pretty sure it is so the company can raise money? Basically if other people buy shares in your company they are kinda paying for some of what you're doing so it lessens the load of the actual company.

This is probably all I know about the subject so maybe someone who is actually a business major should step up and help climbtree out? Heh...I'll go ask some business students around campus...

Stocks are a way for businesses to gain capital by selling off fractions of ownership in the company. I bet Wikipedia could give you a better idea of exactly how it works than myself, since I'm a computer science major, not finance.
Apparently though, if you work at a company long enough they might give you stock options, i.e. you can buy up to X number of shares for a fixed price for Y years. So say you get options to buy 200 shares at $5, then 5 or 6 years later the stocks rise to $10, you could put in a transaction for any number of shares (up to 200) to buy and then immediately sell, with no risk or even cash down.
Apparently stock options are the way to go. But you have to work a while at a company before they're likely to give them to you.

the stock market, is like a pool at a country club. it's open to the public, but there's a separate area for members and rich people. they have 2 diving boards, i'll let you guess which is better. The filters tend to be cleaner on the members' side of the pool, although the water is pretty much the same because it's all connected. now, they have people going around serving food, but there are 2 menus and neither have anything really very good but you figure "well we are at the pool." And if you like towels, you better be a member because they get all the white ones and all the public towels are gray-ish and have stains on them. Most of the time they just burn your eyes and skin when you use them because they are soaked in chlorine and improperly washed. The pool closes at 8 to the public but from 8-10:30 it's open to members and they turn the lights on and serve alcohol.

let me just say that my post was bullshit it was just a joke i hope nobody tries too hard to figure it out.