I understand that of course currency and stock prices can change as a result of a multitude of factors, financial ones and socioeconomic ones.
But some computer program must change the numbers we see on the screen when we look up a stock price? They’re constantly changing so surely there are programs written to make those changes? But who is running those programs? How do they access news reports when there’s bad news and make the prices go down?
In: Economics
There is a list of buy and sell orders in place for nearly every stock on the exchange.
Say for example a stock is currently sitting at 5 dollars, there would be a list that looks like this
BUY—————-SELL
4.99 50k———-5.01 25k
4.98 300———-5.02 13k
4.97 21k———-5.03 118k
That basically shows you how many orders there are and to buy/sell at a particular price, with the buy and sell spread being at 4.99 to 5.01, this sets the price at 5.00, as there are people both buying and selling at 5.00, once one side runs out of orders the price moves in its direction and buying/selling continues.
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