Bid Tick

  

A typical retail trader (a regular person just making a few transactions here and there on their lunch break) will likely follow a stock by looking at the price posted on mainstream stock-tracking websites, making any investment decisions from there. Professional traders go a little deeper.

Behind a stock's price, there's an intricate auction system of bid and ask. Bids represent orders to buy a stock and asks represent orders to sell (See: Bid and Asked). Tracking a bid tick means tracking the order flow on the bid side of the equation. Each bid tick indicates the movement in the bid price, whether moving higher or lower or holding steady.

A savvy trader can read the trend in the bid tick to garner micro advantages in the stock's movement. These kinds of additional benefits don't mean much for any particular trades (so aren't worth tracking for once-in-a-while types), but the additional value can add up over time if the trader is working in a high-volume environment.

Related or Semi-related Video

Finance: What is an Institutional Invest...1 Views

00:00

Finance a la shmoop what is an institutional investor? institution think

00:09

mutual fund company like fidelity or Wellington or State Street or Blackrock [Mutual fund companies appear]

00:14

also think hedge fund think giant pension fund or even a small one the

00:20

"institutional" part of this term means that the investor is a

00:26

professional they've likely gone to grad school taken a bunch of licensing exams

00:31

are really good at math and accounting good at poker probably as well [Person checks cards on poker table]

00:34

apprenticed with old people who mumble through chewed cigars about what the IPO

00:39

of Ford was like with Henry that whippersnapper and those investors are

00:44

professionally responsible for managing OPM other people's money standards are

00:50

higher when you lose someone else's money versus your own

00:53

well the institution behind them raises and retains the dough which is they then [Investor receives cash]

00:57

invest often in large chunks and their viewed as a different class by many

01:02

because unlike the cardiologists investor Club of Northeast Milwaukee

01:07

these investors actually understand the risks they're taking when they invest so [Men stood outside cardiologist investor club sign]

01:13

if a given stock shows tens of thousands of hundreds share trades odds are good

01:18

that cardiologists and their friends are buying in on tips they got from the golf

01:23

course if the trade blocks are in hunks of a hundred thousand or a million [Stocks in a sack of million shares]

01:27

shares each per block that is odds are good that well these are schooled

01:32

institutions buying and selling shares with a presumption that the

01:36

institutional investors will generally know what they're doing or at least more

01:40

so than the you know non institutional getting there so why would you want to

01:44

be an institutional investor? answer = bank if you're good and very very few people [Man discussing institutional investors]

01:51

actually are but if you are one of the vaunted few the proud the knowledgeable

01:56

who beats the market regularly in good markets and bad and can do it at scale

02:02

on hundreds of millions or billions of dollars invested well then you can

02:06

expect to make tens of millions of dollars a year [Man throws cash into the air]

02:09

shepherding the wealth of the wealthy or at least of

02:12

masses collecting your fees and whining about taxes until the cows come home [Cows appear on a field]

02:16

when did they leave anyway?

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