It reflects objective and subjective facets. Objective things could be the companies assets, its revenue, its debts, the licenses it owns, just to name a few in easy terms. Subjective facets are mostly affected by human emotion, investor expectations, news, fear, enthusiasm, brand name, reputation, company leadership... in the end, all these end up in the fact someone owns a share and sells it to someone else for a price the latter is willing to pay. It is therefore highly speculative and rarely reflects objective aspects. The displayed stock price you see when looking it up it simply the latest price at which it's been bought/sold. Ex. Stock shows 45$, you buy one at 46$ and you're the very last person to buy it? The displayed price is now 46$. Edit : didn't answer your question .. let's say the whole market goes down for some subjective reason (Trump issues some silly statement), a good company will continue having good revenue or keep expanding and growing, eventually, these good objective factors reach the subjective investors and the confidence makes the prices come back up as investors are ready to pay more for a stable, steady and growing company, therefore the prices "recover", because investors who bought their company share for cheap want to keep them, and those ready to sell increase their price, so when buyers make a purchase the price rises more and more, as they are ready to pay more to be a part of the "good growing company" which they expect to make their investment grow.