Who pushes the share price up/down.

[bob.not.a.builder]

Is there a guy sitting on a computer pushing up/down share prices based on market sentiment? Or is it done through complicated computer algorithms? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

[Grand Uber]

Its set by the buyers and sellers, the price people are willing to buy and the price people are willing to sell at determines the price of the share.

Its like an auction, which can go down in price aswell as up, with no closing date.

[JulianG]

Bob, the attached image shows what the auction looks like.

It shows buy and sell conditional orders - the buyers and sellers are waiting for a price.

Many other buyers and sellers will place an order at what the market price is offering.

This pushes the price one way or another.

[trackers]

Yip its like a stalemate between buyers and sellers until someone (anyone) breaks it by buying off the lowest seller, or selling to the highest buyer... Rinse and repeat by lining up the new highest buyer and lowest seller and seeing what happens.

[Phaedrus]

Who pushes the share price up? Buyers.

Who pushes the share price down? Sellers.

Movement of the share price (or lack of it) simply reflects their relative strength.

[Year of the Tiger]

Who pushes the share price up? Buyers.

Who pushes the share price down? Sellers.

Movement of the share price (or lack of it) simply reflects their relative strength.

I usually add these sentiments to each group...

Who pushes the share price up? Buyers. (Desire)

Who pushes the share price down? Sellers. (Urgency)

YOTT

[peat]

greed vs fear

[huffer]

Bob – perhaps this will help.

http://www.directbroking.co.nz/direc...etutorial.aspx

> scroll down to "QUICK QUOTE - VIEW: DEPTH"

[neopole]

i wonder how many buyers and sellers use sharetrading software?
as buy signals apear the people buy........ as sell signals apear.... they sell.

seems to me, that most traders follow the direction of their software signals.

so you could say, that a very small handfull of people can place a buy or sell and trigger a buy or sell on thousands of peoples share trading software.
for instance......... NZO is linked to the price of oil, whether it produces oil or not!!!
look at a 3 year chart..........
this just shows that most traders are just punters following a piece of software relying on historical data. this is how trading waves are formed, bubbles and crashes.
those that get rich are the ones that dont follow the herd... or trigger the herd into a direction.

It used to be the taxi driver comments that spelled the end of a bubble, now its a ping on your trading software......... trouble is......... all the pings go off at the same time, as with the taxi driver it takes a few weeks for the dump orders to go out.

so Bob, a very good question

[JulianG]

Well it doesn't work like that because much of the action is off market.

When an institution buys or sells they tend to deal off the market which adjusts the price.

Or they will drip feed the order into the market through several brokers to average out the price.

The size of these orders have a much greater effect than computer trading.