What is the difference between "common" and "preferred stock"?
There's really two types of stocks. There's a common stock and a preferred stock. The preferred stock usually pays a dividend, and it's a fixed dividend. So as a result, common stocks tend to look more like bonds and trade more like bonds. Also, preferred stocks generally don't have voting rights like a common stock would. One of the last differences is, if the company default, the preferred stocks get to get paid back from the value of the company before a common stock would. Usually when someone is talking about a stock and what's being traded, they are almost always referring to a common stock. Because preferred stocks look so much like a bond in the way they trade, you're not really participating in the capital appreciation of a company. Which is really when you buy stock you're owning ownership in that company and what you're betting on is that the company is going to grow through time.