I understand how supply and demand works but I’m confused as to who actually is in charge of setting the price to display to all trading platforms. Since the stock price is constant across all trading platforms, what algorithm or system is in place to ensure there are no clashes or discrepancies between said platforms? Is there one dominating platform that monitors all stock prices which other platforms refer to such as the NYSE?
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It is possible to buy stock and other financial products on one market and sell it on another. There are several high speed trading companies specialising in exactly this. Whenever an equivalent commodity have different prices between two markets the high speed traders will relay this information between the markets as fast as possible and then trade the commodity until the prices are the same. The margins on this is razor thin as they might do millions of dollars of trades only to earn a few hundred dollars in return. But they do this automatically all day for many different commodities so they can make at least a living wage.
It does however require a lot of special equipment as they need to beat all the other traders. They used to have dedicated fiber optics lines between the markets to make the physical route the shortest possible and so they could install their own low latency equipment. But it have become more and more common to use radio links as these are even shorter then fiber lines.
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