In financial markets, a share is a unit of account for various financial instruments including stocks, mutual funds, limited partnerships, and REIT's. In British English, use of the word shares in the plural to refer to stock is so common that it almost replaces the word stock itself. And especially in American English, the plural stocks is widely used instead of shares, in other words to refer to the stock (or perhaps originally stock certificates) of even a single company. Traditionalist demands that the plural stocks be used to refer only to stock of more than one company are rarely heard nowadays....
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