A share price is the price of a single share of a company's stock. Once the stock is purchased, the owner becomes a shareholder of the company that issued the share. The price is calculated by dividing the market capitalization by the total number of shares outstanding.
When viewed over long periods, the share price is directly related to the earnings and dividends of the firm. Over short periods, especially for younger or smaller firms, the relationship between share price and dividends can be quite irrational.
Technical analysis uses most of the anomalies to extract information on future price movements from historical data. But some economists, for example Eugene Fama, argue that most of these patterns occur accidentally, rather than as a result of irrational or inefficient behavior of investors: the huge amount of data available to researchers for analysis allegedly causes the fluctuations.
Another school of thought, behavioral finance, attributes non-randomness to investors' cognitive and emotional biases. This can be contrasted with Fundamental analysis.
