Questions tagged [trading]
Trading means exchanging one item for another such as goods for money. In finance, trading refers to the buying and selling of securities such as stock, options, or futures. Related tags are day-trading, trading-volume, and online-trading.
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Do I make money in the stock market from other people losing money?
Basically I am new to stock trading and neglect to see the differences between trading stocks and betting on sports. Basically I am "betting" on which company will do well, and this can ...
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How can there exist a profession consisting of investing others' money?
How can there be a profession where some person sits at a desk and trades or invests for somebody else? If they are so smart and can predict the market so well, would they not long ago have invested ...
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Is it a good idea to copy a trader when investing?
I constantly get bombarded with an etoro commercial on youtube about a feature where you can replicate someone else's trading activity in real time. More details here. You select another trader and ...
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Why does demand for stock rise when a company appears to have high future value?
So a company decides to raise money by selling shares of its stock. The stock is offered at an initial price of their determination. The stock is then traded in a market where forces of supply and ...
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Maker taker fees - can somebody explain in plain english?
I'm interested in learning about how trading works, but this is all very new to me so bear with me. (I'm just poking around at this point, obviously nowhere near ready to actually be trading)
Some ...
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How to profit off a stock price falling
How would one profit from a share price falling, granted that they correctly predicted it would happen?
Say I had a hunch that a certain stock was going to fall next week, how could I effectively ...
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Why don’t index-tracking mutual funds corner themselves?
I don't really want to think too much about investments -- just park my surplus money somewhere and be able to come back several years later and see that it has grown. (As this question shows, I'm ...
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Shares: are they really only for the rich/investors?
I've always been under the impression that if you want to be a player in the "shares game" you either have to be an full time investor, or someone who has a lot of money to play with.
Is ...
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Difference between GOOGL and GOOG
Why are there two ticker symbols for Google — GOOGL and GOOG?
They seem to be mostly identical, but their market values are different: currently, 551.64 for GOOGL and 548.79 for GOOG.
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Is it insider trading to purchase shares in a competitor?
I work for a publicly traded company, and part of my compensation includes stock. We've gotten a bunch of (recurring) training of what not to do with this stock to avoid insider trading -- for example,...
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Should I sell my stocks when the stock hits a 52-week high in order to "Buy Low, Sell High"?
I have a 10 stock portfolio and considering market conditions that are on the rise when this question in being asked, a few of them did hit their 52-week high price.
I would like to call myself a ...
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Is it normal for brokers to ask whether I am a beginner?
I know that a broker would try to do their best to help a customer learn if they are beginners so that they stick with them. Apart from that, do you think there might be other reasons behind doing it?
...
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What is the meaning of "short selling" or "going short" a stock?
Can someone please explain the meaning of 'shorting' a stock with an example?
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Is the stock market a zero-sum game?
In the stock market, over both the short and long-term, does someone necessary need to lose in order for someone else to make a profit? If not, then more fundamentally does something — in the most ...
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How far removed from source does one need to be to avoid Insider Trading?
As I tried to research and ponder this question, I couldn't help but wonder:
How many steps (i.e., persons) removed does one need to be from a source of material/non-public information regarding a ...
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How do I bet that a stock price will not move?
If I believe a stock will go up, I buy the stock. If I believe a stock will go down, I short the stock. If I believe a stock will neither go up nor down, what do I do? How do I profit from a non-...
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Why are daily rebalanced inverse/leveraged ETFs bad for long term investing?
I was reading this article about S&P 500 short ETFs:
https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/176217/4-ways-to-short-the-sampp-500-with-etfs
and I was confused when it said: "investors should note that ...
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How does a dealer (or market maker) earn the bid-ask spread on a stock?
If I am correct, dealers purchase assets for their own accounts, and
later sell them for a profit from their inventory. But the
spreads is the difference between buy (or "bid") prices and sell (or
"...
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Foolish to place orders before the market opens?
I was wondering if it is unwise to place orders for stocks/ETFs before the market opens. I am almost always buying to add more to existing positions. I don't have any time during the day to make ...
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Why would a financial institution prevent their clients from trading a specific security?
Ameritrade restricts trading of Gamestop:
"In the interest of mitigating risk for our company and clients, we have put in place several restrictions on some transactions in $GME [GameStop], $AMC ...
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What does "buyer is maker" mean?
What do "buyer is maker" and "buyer is not maker" mean? If a trade happens where the "buyer is maker", does that mean that the trade happened as buyer bought a share?
I ...
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Is it true that 90% of investors lose their money?
Many investment gurus state that majority of investors fail and then offer a proven "[insert fancy name] investment strategy" that will make you successful. The number usually starts at 90% and often ...
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Why use a stop-limit order instead of a limit order?
"A limit order is an order to buy or sell a stock at a specific price or better. A buy limit order can only be executed at the limit price or lower, and a sell limit order can only be executed at ...
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Why do market-makers usually win against traders?
I heard that market-makers — like TD Ameritrade and Fidelity – usually make profits while traders do not, especially in foreign exchange. Why is that?
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What is insider trading exactly?
I know that insider trading is illegal. However, is it true that the CEO of a listed company can still buy/sell their own stock? If he/she does so, isn't that technically insider trading? Or why is it ...
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What happens if I do not honor a futures contract?
I have little knowledge about futures contracts. The recent negative price of crude oil spurred my curiosity about this stuff.
I read this post about buying/selling futures contracts. According to ...
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Beginning to trade from a mathematics background
I'm from a mathematics background and I'm curious to understand the skill of profiting off the stock market as an individual. Is it ones ability to predict successful businesses? Is quantitative ...
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Paradox - When to buy & when to sell a share?
Warren Buffett says buy when everyone is selling and sell when everyone is buying. Taking into consideration the support and resistance levels, everyone is selling near the resistance level and ...
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FOREX: Pair Trading, What is Really Happening?
I am starting to study FOREX again and one thing about trading on the
market through means available to me personally is that one can take
positions on 'currency pairs'. This has made little sense to ...
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When would one actually want to use a market order instead of a limit order?
I'm new to investing. I'm looking into using an online discount broker to experiment with private trading. I'm in a position I don't mind losing money, but I don't want to lose more than I put in. ...
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Algorithmic trading in linux using python [closed]
Is there any real time trading platform in linux in which one can test automated trading scripts written in python by ordering to a broker in a trial or demo account? Is IbPy the way to go? But IB ...
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How can put options be used to buy shares at a lower price?
How to use puts, if you are a net buyer of stocks?
I read an article about Warren Buffett buying Burlington Northern stocks and how he used puts to lower the buying price of the shares. Please, ...
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Do "normal" shares in large companies pay equity, as well as profit?
If I buy shares in a big company like Intel or Microsoft I (can) receive a dividend. So these shares (can) pay "profit".
However, if the company is bought, do i also receive a split of the "equity"/...
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Why is short-selling considered more "advanced" than a simple buy?
Considering the downward spiral in the market (which many are predicted will continue), I was thinking perhaps selling short would be the right strategy.
But from what I can tell on my brokerage ...
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Who buys these significantly out-of-money options? [duplicate]
The following is the screenshot of the NIFTY 50 option chain.
It is taken from the following link.
Why are these people buying these significantly out-of-the-money options? In this case, it's the ...
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Can a trade happen "in between" the bid and ask price?
According to Investopedia:
By looking for trades that take place in between the bid and ask, you
can tell when a strong trend is about to come to an end. This is
because these trades are often ...
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My account's been labeled as "day trader" and I got a big margin call. What should I do? What trades can I place in the blocked period?
HI I recently received a day trading margin call of $14,852.63 requirement. I do not have that much money. What should I do? Should I close my trades and take all cash out? The system labeled me as ...
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If I sold some stock by mistake and immediately bought it back, is that sale still subject to capital gain tax in USA?
Today I wanted to buy a few shares of Apple (AAPL), let's say 10 shares.
When I handled the UI, there was the "By number of shares" and "By dollar amount" and then "Market&...
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No transaction fee ETF trades - what's the catch?
I just noticed TD Ameritrade has program where you can trade from a list of ETFs with zero fees.
Sounds like it could save me a bit of money, but my cynical side wonders how they make money off such ...
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What publicly available software do professional stock traders use for stock analysis?
What publicly available software do professional stock traders use for stock analysis? I assume they use something more advanced than Google Finance... right?
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Why don't traders place limit orders at all prices to be first in line when the price moves?
In markets with price-time priority, why don't traders enter limit orders at all prices, so that they could be first in line when the price moves? For example, if the current best bid is $10 and the ...
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Is it an OK strategy to sell whenever an investment gains value above a threshold?
Let's say I bought 10k worth of stock A and it appreciates to $10,500.
Is it OK to sell part of it worth $500 and do this whenever stock appreciates that much?
Too often it drops back under $10k if ...
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Why are options more popular than futures among retail investors?
I am puzzled as to why options seem to be more popular than futures among retail investors. Brokerage firms seem to emphasize their options offerings more than their futures offerings. On Robinhood, ...
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Why can Robinhood offer trading without commissions?
I was wondering why the startup Robinhood can offer free stock trading, while other online stock brokers charge commissions. How is it possible that this is the first initiative that offers this kind ...
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Why do non-electronic stock exchanges (with floor traders) still exist?
Now that a lot of the trading is done electronically why does trading on the "physical" stock exchanges (such as NYSE) still exists? Does every NYSE listed stock sale really go through a trader on the ...
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What is the point of using a limit order?
I'm pretty new to trading, more specifically day-trading, and on my paper trading account, I am given the option to trade at the market's current value vs. putting in a limit order. I could understand ...
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Can we estimate the impact of a large buy order on the share price?
What I am trying to understand is: If we know the number of shares a company trades and the current price of the share, can we estimate what volume of trade that is required to move the share price in ...
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What's happening in this scene from Wall Street?
Here's the vid - about one minute into it, you can see the action I'm talking about.
I know basically zilch about the stock market. But I have seen something like the scene above in a few movies - ...
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Consequences of buying/selling a large number of shares for a low volume stock?
Out of curiosity, I've casually followed some penny stocks that trade for under a dollar a share, and find occasional swings up of 10-15%. One naive interpretation of this fact is that if I bought $...
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When the market price for a stock is below a tender offer's price, is it free money (riskless) to buy shares & tender them?
For instance, on March 11, 2014, Jos A Bank (JOSB) agreed to be acquired by Men's Wearhouse for $65/share in cash. A tender offer to existing shareholders was set to expire on March 19th. On March ...
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