Stock market is basically a continuous auction. You have people saying they will sell for $1 or more, and then people saying they will buy for $0.98 or less. When a sell order and a buy order can agree on a figure, that stock trades hands.
For example, when buying, you can do a market buy: your broker will find the cheapest (ish) sell price currently, and buy them on your behalf.
Or you could put in a buy order at a certain cost per share, and that will get filled when sell orders at that price come in.
Vice versa for the selling side.
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