I see news articles about stock prices going up or down due to investor confidence or trust. How can group-think affect a stock price that rapidly is the value of the company is largely unchanged?

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I see news articles about stock prices going up or down due to investor confidence or trust. How can group-think affect a stock price that rapidly is the value of the company is largely unchanged?

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4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

stock price is the price at which 0.1% of company stock was sold yesterday. People who buy and sell stocks daily are prone to hypes and group-think.

Company itself is not directly affected by stock price movements. If stock price is low for a while, somebody might think the company is actually undervalued, and buy it, and change the way it is run.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Say a report comes out that a company is changing CEOs, and the new guy doesn’t have a great record. Generally accepted knowledge amongst professional investors means this could cause the company to lose money, and the stock to go down. So a bunch of people who learned their “fundamentals of business” the same way and think the same thing start selling off this company. Investors who don’t know about the CEO thing see a bunch of high-level financial types selling the stock, and think “well they must know something” and start selling too. Before you know it, everybody is trying to sell instead of buying…because everybody else is trying to sell. When nobody wants to buy, you lower your asking price until somebody buys it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Remember that you are measuring price in dollars (you could also measure a stock price against gold, other commodities, etc).

Let’s have a look at the S&P500 valued against the M2 money supply:

[https://www.tradingview.com/chart/SPX/7Xwy9qNL-SPX-M2-Money-Supply-comparison-is-eye-opening/](https://www.tradingview.com/chart/SPX/7Xwy9qNL-SPX-M2-Money-Supply-comparison-is-eye-opening/)

Interesting isn’t it?

Anonymous 0 Comments

What’s alluded to, but not clearly stated, is that the stock market isn’t like, say, the grocery store.

At a grocery store, the store sets the prices & people either take it or leave it.

The stock market is more like eBay, where there are a bunch of identical listings & room to haggle.

People who have shares to sell say “This is how many shares I have to sell & the lowest price I’m willing to take”.

People who want to buy shares say “This is how many shares I want to buy and the highest price I’m willing to pay”.

They then move up or down to meet each other and make a deal.

The stock market is just a way of bringing those people together.

The price you see is nothing more than “This is where the buyer and seller are meeting”.

The entire market is based on what you refer to as “group-think”.

If people think something bad is going to happen, they want to get out before other investors catch on & stop buying. But they’ll be desperate to sell and could potentially push the price down if they’re dealing enough.

If people think something good is going to happen, they want to get in before the price skyrockets, and are willing to offer more to do it, thus potentially raising the price.

It’s essentially just supply and demand. It’s not based on what actually happens, but, rather, how shareholders & wannabe shareholders perceive what’s happening/about to happen.

You’re essentially betting that other people will eventually want to buy your stock at a higher price when you buy.