Quote

A quote is the current price (or pair of prices) at which a market participant is willing to buy or sell something, like a stock, option, or currency pair. When you pull up a symbol on your broker's platform, the numbers you see are the quote.

Most quotes actually show two prices: the bid, which is the highest price someone is currently willing to pay for the asset, and the ask (also called the offer), which is the lowest price someone is currently willing to sell it for. The gap between the two is called the spread. A "last" price, showing where the most recent trade actually happened, is often displayed alongside the bid and ask but is technically a separate piece of data.

Quotes come from the exchange or market makers that handle the buying and selling of that asset, and they update constantly as new orders come in and get matched or cancelled. A quote is not a promise that you can trade at that exact price; by the time your order reaches the market, the quote may have already moved, especially in fast-moving or thinly traded names.

The trip-up for beginners is treating the quote as one single "price" of the stock. There is no single price — there's what buyers are offering (bid), what sellers are asking (ask), and what the last trade happened to be. Also worth knowing: some free or delayed data feeds show quotes that lag the real-time market by a few seconds or more, which matters a lot if you're trying to time entries closely.