High volume, no movement..why?

[goodfellow]

Quote from cashmoney69:



Also, once a stock is split, is there no way to un-split them?

- nathan

I don't think so. Once the decision is made and executed, then there is no way to undo it(or unsplit the stock). The shareholders vote on the stock split in advance and decide weather they want to split or not. So once the jury(shareholders) made the decision and follow through, they can't undo it.

Stocks usually split when they are running low on shares. Sometimes a stock split is good and other times it saturates or drowns the stock because there isn't enough buyers to make it keep moving.

Berkshaw Hathaway stock never split. Google said they plan on following Berkshaw Hathaway's footprints and never split also. We'll see if Google splits or not.

There is a such thing as a reverse split. But it has nothing to do with what we are discussing. Only penny stocks usually reverse split to keep from getting delisted. You can read about reverse split here.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reversesplit.asp

 

[Pabst]

I wasn't talking about single day news events in equities. Clearly in those situations stocks may see record volume.

I was referring more to the debate over normal (average) daily volume and the relationship to volatility.

In otherworlds if the question is, "if stock ABC trades a volume of x and stock ZZZ trades a volume of 3x, should be ABC be more volatile than ZZZ? My answer is no. There's no should. One in fact may be more volatile than the other. We can find thousands of comparisons each way. However while volume of transactions can predicate liquidity, in no way does it predicates volatility.


Bit, even in your example of news driven vol/vol. On those days, is it volatility that brings in additional players or does the high volume cause the additional volatility. I'd argue those stocks would react in the same manner whether 100,000,000 or a 100k shares are traded.

Quote from Bitstream:

although rufus is perfectly right in what he said, i have to disagree on this one for what concerns the mkt as a whole...usually volumes drive vola, it is clear if u analyze the days the bb trade more than 2bln shares compared to those when just 1.2bln exchange hands...on stocks we should be maybe better off differentiatin' between the usual daily volumes in a particular stock and explosion of volumes durin' days followin' news announcements/report, etc.] in the latter environment it is pretty clear that the sheer amount of volume cause volatility to increase dramatically.

 

[Bitstream]

i would argue that volumes when solid or exceptional help to push vols higher...look at the vix when was at his highs recently; volatility was sure very high on futs, not so much on stocks, infact they all behaved more or less the same as before, with maybe a bit more follow trough on down stocks and this due to the characteristic summer lack of volumes imo....look also at sept-oct when money pour into the mkt...ranges sure increase innit...again talkin' about mkt as a whole not individual cases....volumes help to push mkt in one or the other direction, if theres not enough of it res/supp levels wont be easily penetrated.

 

[Pabst]

Quote from Bitstream:

i would argue that volumes when solid or exceptional help to push vols higher...look at the vix when was at his highs recently; volatility was sure very high on futs, not so much on stocks, infact they all behaved more or less the same as before, with maybe a bit more follow trough on down stocks and this due to the characteristic summer lack of volumes imo....look also at sept-oct when money pour into the mkt...ranges sure increase innit...again talkin' about mkt as a whole not individual cases....volumes help to push mkt in one or the other direction, if theres not enough of it res/supp levels wont be easily penetrated.

On one hand your saying the recent market break was systematic of lower summer volume but then you're saying it takes volume to push the market through "levels".

Then you talk about Sept-Oct when "money pours into the market". What about summer of 2002 when SPX plunged 30% in June and July. Or 8/98 when the low "summer volume" took the market down 15%. Think, RANDOM.


In whatever case, you're offering no proof that one causes the other on anything other than a case by case basis. I've seen people BS there way around this question for twenty years. If the market tops on a high volume day the experts will exert their 20/20 hindsight and say "there!, obviously capitulation by the shorts, no need for higher prices." But if the market continues higher those same "gurus" are piping, "well this puppy went higher on that strong accumulative buying."

I mean look at it like this. If ZZZ misses by a wide mark, what happens? In after hours on relatively ZERO volume the stock comes off 10-20%. Then on the following day, the stock of course gaps to the AH levels and trades record volume in a volatile range without "filling in" any of those zero volume prices from the night before. Thus the "record volume" activity was predicated upon news that to re-valued ZZZ on no volume.

And if you think high volume is bullish I'll tell you this. The most lethal rallies I've seen are light volume several month affairs where "traders" keep shorting prices "above value" and there's so little for sale by "holders" that the stuff creeps on higher highs/higher lows for weeks. With small ranges and low inter-day volatility. The exact opposite of what textbooks would say.

 

[steve46]

Well it would seem (to me anyway) that this is a question that can be answered pretty quickly, IF YOU THINK about it for a minute.

What moves the market is people who are willing to either put money to work, or conversely are afraid that they will lose money if they do not remove it from the market. Ordinarilly there is a dynamic process going on that swings the balance from one side to the other. Certainly this description is an over simplification, but it should be sufficient for the audience.

In a nutshell, it is "imbalances" one way or the other that move markets. On a day when we have a "buyer's strike" guess where the market is going? AND it will get there, on low volume if it has to

On days where no one wants to sell, the market is going up believe me. Volume isn't the mover, demand is. Buyers either pay up or they sit and wait FOR PRICE TO GET TO A POINT THAT ENTICES SELLERS TO OFFER SHARES.

Is everybody getting it now?

Good.

Steve

 

[Pabst]

Real nice explanation Steve! Exactly!

Quote from steve46:

Well it would seem (to me anyway) that this is a question that can be answered pretty quickly, IF YOU THINK about it for a minute.

What moves the market is people who are willing to either put money to work, or conversely are afraid that they will lose money if they do not remove it from the market. Ordinarilly there is a dynamic process going on that swings the balance from one side to the other. Certainly this description is an over simplification, but it should be sufficient for the audience.

In a nutshell, it is "imbalances" one way or the other that move markets. On a day when we have a "buyer's strike" guess where the market is going? AND it will get there, on low volume if it has to

On days where no one wants to sell, the market is going up believe me. Volume isn't the mover, demand is. Buyers either pay up or they sit and wait FOR PRICE TO GET TO A POINT THAT ENTICES SELLERS TO OFFER SHARES.

Is everybody getting it now?

Good.

Steve

 

[Bitstream]

Quote from Pabst:

On one hand your saying the recent market break was systematic of lower summer volume but then you're saying it takes volume to push the market through "levels".

Then you talk about Sept-Oct when "money pours into the market". What about summer of 2002 when SPX plunged 30% in June and July. Or 8/98 when the low "summer volume" took the market down 15%. Think, RANDOM.


In whatever case, you're offering no proof that one causes the other on anything other than a case by case basis. I've seen people BS there way around this question for twenty years. If the market tops on a high volume day the experts will exert their 20/20 hindsight and say "there!, obviously capitulation by the shorts, no need for higher prices." But if the market continues higher those same "gurus" are piping, "well this puppy went higher on that strong accumulative buying."

I mean look at it like this. If ZZZ misses by a wide mark, what happens? In after hours on relatively ZERO volume the stock comes off 10-20%. Then on the following day, the stock of course gaps to the AH levels and trades record volume in a volatile range without "filling in" any of those zero volume prices from the night before. Thus the "record volume" activity was predicated upon news that to re-valued ZZZ on no volume.

And if you think high volume is bullish I'll tell you this. The most lethal rallies I've seen are light volume several month affairs where "traders" keep shorting prices "above value" and there's so little for sale by "holders" that the stuff creeps on higher highs/higher lows for weeks. With small ranges and low inter-day volatility. The exact opposite of what textbooks would say.

i pointed out at the FACT that on high volumes days the bb is much more likely to move either way....look, i was the first to point out that rufus was infact correct in sayin' that imbalances drive volatility but usually and i repeat USUALLY mkt trade in wider ranges when sustained volumes is present. again, look at nyse when less than 1.5bln shares trade on every given day and compare the ranges of the days when more than 2bln make up the total daily volumes.

for what concerns ah it is a whole diff matter because of the extreme imbalances caused by concentration of volumes...and here we go back to rufus assertion.

 

[PitchBlack]

Quote from steve46:

....
Is everybody getting it now?

Good.

Steve

2 days ago when i said the same thing apparently they didn't get it. Why should they get it now?

 

[murray t turtle]

Quote from spike500:

If there are more potential buyers than sellers, the buyers will have to pay a premium to get filled. Those who pay the highest price will be filled easier than those who want to buy cheap.
If there is a balance between buyers and sellers you can trade huge volumes without moving the prices.

Probably the unbalance in Google is bigger than in Intel.

=====================
Exactly.
GE has gone nowhere on near record volume before;
ES has some good lunch moves on practically no volume.

Let me simplify it, hope this helps;
if you disagree with these points, you havent studied many charts.

In other words ever seen a bunch of strong men play tug of war ;
no matter the volume of men/muscle, an even match means balanced , it will NOT move much. Some dont watch volume at all

 

[steve46]

Quote from spike500:

2 days ago when i said the same thing apparently they didn't get it. Why should they get it now?

Ah yes, that does happen here occasionally.

lol

Steve