Underneath the stock prices that you can look up on any stock quoting site, there's a dynamic process of bids and asks. A bid is the amount someone is willing to pay for a stock. The ask is the amount the seller is willing to accept.
Regular folks just go to their Ameritrade accounts and pay the market price for the stock at any given time. Wall Street players get into the weeds with the bid/ask, trying to get the best possible price (when you're dealing with millions of dollars, those fractions of a cent per share start to add up).
The phrase "bidding up" has a couple connotations. In its more general sense, it just means something like "sending the stock higher," as in "investors are really bidding up shares of Apple today."
On a more technical level, the phrase can refer to a strategy for acquiring shares at a time when a stock is rising quickly. Basically, if you try to get too cute with your bid when a stock is skyrocketing, you could end up under-bidding the market and not getting any stock at all.
Bidding up means that you take the fact that the stock is rising into account when you place your bid, over-bidding to make sure you find a matching ask. Of course, this process helps fuel the upward rise in the stock, which can last until people finally start saying to themselves, "This is stupid. I'm just going to go buy bonds instead for a while."
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Finance: What is Spread?48 Views
finance a la shmoop. what is spread? before we start just no. get your mind
out of the gutter. spread refers to the money value between [100 dollar bill]
a bid and ask price under a market maker structure of trading securities. no more
wire hangers, a plastic hanger company is publicly traded on an exchange like
Nasdaq where buyers bid for a price to purchase and sellers ask for a price to [Nasdaq wall shown]
trade. no more wire hangers is bid this moment at 37:23 a share by buyers
willing to buy right now at that price and is being asked at this moment at a
price of 37.31. note the eight cents a shared difference in the share prices.
that dif is the spread between the two prices, and it's worth noting that in [bread is buttered]
extremely volatile stocks, the spread widens. and in boring highly liquid
stocks which don't move much, the spread tightens or is narrower. that is on a
volatile equivalent of no more wire hangers the spread might grow to 20 or
30 cents a share whereas a boring name that pays a big dividend and the stock
never moves much we're thinking AT&T here, [man snores at a desk]
well that spread might be just three or four cents. so why grow? well because a
market maker in a volatile stock doesn't want to be caught losing money on her
inventory. if no more wire hangers suddenly gapped down to 37.10 a share [equation shown]
well it would be likely less than the average of what the market maker paid
for her quote "inventory" unquote in that stock from which he was making a market
in it. each time the shares trade the market makers dip into that spread to [woman dips cracker in butter]
pay their bills and allow them to keep doing business. so that's spread. and it's
not the type that Prince used to sing about. [man on stage]
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