Recently, I’ve noticed that many beginners get stuck in the stock market—especially because they don’t understand why Taiwanese stocks are so expensive to buy, while U.S. stocks are incredibly cheap. The truth is, it comes down to trading units.

First, let’s talk about what a stock price is. Simply put, a stock price is the price at which you buy or sell a stock, representing how much one share costs. For example, TSMC’s stock price is 561 New Taiwan Dollars (NTD). That means one share costs 561. Tesla’s U.S. stock price is $254, so one share costs $254. Stock prices change in real time based on the executed prices between buyers and sellers—this should be easy to understand.

But there’s a key difference here. The trading units for Taiwanese stocks and U.S. stocks are fundamentally different. For U.S. stocks, the trading unit is one share—buying one share means buying one share. But Taiwanese stocks are different: the basic trading unit is a “lot,” and 1 lot equals 1,000 shares. This is why many people feel that Taiwanese stocks are expensive.

Let’s look at a real example. Suppose TSMC’s stock price is 561 New Taiwan Dollars. If you want to convert the stock price into New Taiwan Dollars, buying one lot of TSMC would cost 561 multiplied by 1,000, which is 561,000 New Taiwan Dollars. That’s a large amount for retail investors. In contrast, the U.S. stock price for TSMC (ticker TSM) is roughly 95 dollars; buying one share only costs $95. When converted, that’s just a few thousand New Taiwan Dollars—so the entry threshold is completely different.

That’s why Taiwanese stocks also introduced fractional share trading, allowing retail investors to buy less than 1,000 shares. However, fractional shares have lower liquidity, and matching only happens once every minute, unlike whole-lot trading, which is more immediate. If you have the budget, it’s still better to trade in whole lots.

When converting stock prices into New Taiwan Dollars, you also need to keep in mind that the stock’s face value and the stock price are two different things. Face value is simply the value set when the company initially issued the shares, and most Taiwanese stocks have a face value of 10 New Taiwan Dollars. But the stock price is determined by whether the company is profitable and whether investors are optimistic about it. If a company performs well, its stock price usually rises; if not, it goes the other way.

There are actually quite a few factors that affect stock prices. The company’s own financial condition and profitability are the foundation. Then macroeconomic factors also matter—such as GDP and interest rates, which can influence the stock market. Finally, there’s market sentiment: sometimes a bad news story or political instability can trigger panic, and stock prices fall as a result.

Coming back to the issue of converting stock prices into New Taiwan Dollars, it’s really just about using the current market price. If you want to calculate how much it costs to buy one lot of Taiwanese stocks, multiply the price of one share by 1,000. For U.S. stocks, you simply multiply the price of one share by the number of shares you want to buy. With that, you can quickly estimate how much capital you need to enter the market. Many trading platforms today also have calculator features—just enter the stock code and quantity, and it will compute the cost for you, saving you from doing the math manually.