Seaspan stock: Charts and news tell the sad story

— -- A: It can be difficult to pinpoint the reason a stock rises or falls.

Stock prices are determined by a ongoing action on stock exchanges. Buyers and sellers bid for stocks and the price moves up and down during the day. Stock prices are often moved by news, which causes buyers and sellers to reassess what the stock is worth to them.

With that background in mind, you can get a decent idea why some stocks are moving by scanning the news headlines and related press releases on the stock quote pages when you request a quote in USATODAY.com's Money section.

When we look at the stock quote page for Seaspan, a China-based ocean shipping company, you can see in the price quote line that the stock has suffered a vicious 24% decline this year (YTD% Chg.).

If you dig further, clicking on USATODAY.com's Charts tab, you can see the stock hit its 52-week high of $26.35 a share in August last year, just before the global economic downturn. Shipping, of course, is heavily dependent on exports and imports, which have suffered terribly.

More recently, Seaspan stock took a big percentage tumble, from $9.25 to $6.70 a share, on April 28.

That day, the company reported a 17% drop in earnings per share. And Seaspan slashed its dividend from nearly 48 cents a share in the fourth quarter to 10 cents a share for the first quarter.

You can read the news here from the company's press release.

All that certainly reduces the value of the company to investors, driving down the stock price.

Matt Krantz is a financial markets reporter at USA TODAY and author of Investing Online for Dummies. He answers a different reader question every weekday in his Ask Matt column at money.usatoday.com. To submit a question, e-mail Matt at mkrantz@usatoday.com. Click here to see previous Ask Matt columns. Follow Matt on Twitter at: twitter.com/mattkrantz