Behind the Market Swoon: The Herdlike Behavior of Computerized Trading

Re:Behind the Market Swoon: The Herdlike Behavior of Compute... by jm__87 on Thursday December 27, 2018 @12:25PM (#18770896)

Yes, perhaps I should have chose my words more carefully. When more people want to buy than sell, prices rise. When more people want to sell than buy, prices fall. The exact details of how this happens vary from market to market but in general this is how it works. For every trade there has to be a buyer and a seller. The imbalances occur in the buy and sell orders.

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Re:Behind the Market Swoon: The Herdlike Behavior of Compute... by ctlby on Friday December 28, 2018 @08:48PM (#18781167)

But to a first approximation, the numbers are the same! If anything, some of the biggest moves happen when a single (big) buyer or seller is active. It’s all about the prices participants are willing to trade at, not an imbalance of one group vs another.

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Re:Behind the Market Swoon: The Herdlike Behavior of Compute... by jm__87 on Monday December 31, 2018 @02:42PM (#18796478)

I would think it depends on what scale you're looking at. It is pretty obvious that if one guy takes out a large chunk of the order book of one security, over the course of seconds, on only one side of the market, the price is going to move. If we're talking about the S&P 500 dropping over the course of a few months, I think it is accurate to say that those who want to sell are outnumbering those who want to buy.

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