You can check the value of stocks share online, in apps on your phone etc… But what is that value really? And how do we know on real time how the value has changed.
For example, if a company increases profits its value in the stocks will increase, but what is recording the incomes of the company? Is it connected to a similar system that the bank uses to store money? Is it similar to an internet network?
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You have an incorrect premise.
> You can check the value of stocks share online
This is false, what you are seeing is not the value of a stock, what you are seeing is the recent transaction data.
If I own a baseball card, and the baseball player dies suddenly. My card might go up in value, or might not. No one really knows until a buyer and a seller agree on a price. If that price happens to be a public auction, then everyone will know that price and the “value” of everyone’s baseball cards will change.
The stock markets work much the same, but there’s millions of buys and sells happening all day long. And the stock exchange itself publishes the prices of these buys and sells.
A buyer can offer less than the list price for a stock, and someone might be willing to sell to them, and if they are then the list price of the stock will fall.
A buyer can offer more than list price, it would likely be easy to find a buyer at more than list price, and once that transaction completes the list price of the stock goes up.
It’s really important to understand that these prices are actual buy and sell prices negotiates between real buyers and sellers. It’s not a “price tag” that gets set by some third party or even the seller themselves.
What we call the stock price, is actually a historic reflection of actual transactions that have already occured. It’s all happening very fast, so it seems like “real time” prices, but it’s not. It’s just a historic transaction record.
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