Hey team,

I'm a young student doing engineering up in Auckland (20 years old, two years down and 2 more to go!) and I've recently become interested in investing. I have a mere couple thousand I've been saving over the course of the summer doing my engineering internship so rather than being ready to invest I'm more looking to build knowledge of how the market works, reacts and changes so I can start to make some decisions on where to put my money for a more comfortable future.

I've been looking around the site daily to follow some stocks and keep updated with how they're moving until I finally made an account in the hopes to start asking questions and further build some know how. I haven't formally learnt anything to do with business, economics or accounting (didn't even take a year of any at school) but I like to think I'm relatively clued up and find maths simple enough (I've done enough in school and engineering to become relatively comfortable with it). I started reading Ben Graham's intelligent investor which seems to be a highly recommended book around here in terms of the emotional side behind investing and I'm quickly getting knees deep into that.

So with that info out of the way I have a couple of questions that may have some elaborate answers

- If the share price is fundamentally controlled by the bidding of investors, why (theoretically) should the share price change to converge with the theoretical value of the share? Especially if dividends don't come into that equation

- How would one start to get a good idea of valuing a company?

- is a couple grand too small to start in the market? I understand that brokerage will kill my earnings unless the stock really jumps up but is there anything I may be missing in the venture to build up on my small capital?

With those questions I hope I haven't sounded to mislead on the market situation but aside from that, happy to be here and hope I learn a bunch

Cheers
Sam