How do market makers make money?

I don't either, but would it be fair to say that the less liquidity the more challenging it is?
No, the less order flow, the more challenging. Making money as a MM in any asset class requires transactions. If your strategy and risk management is sound, the more trades you do the more money you make. That simple.
 
I know what the spread is but it still doesn't make sense. If there is a stock which is crashing hard then how are they not losing money.

It seems all of you also have no idea how it works - you keep spewing out the same nonsense about the spread but don't actually understand the spread has nothing to do with it.

If they are being forced to provide a bid on a stock that is tanking then that bid will be hammered until the price has lost all of it's gains. So the market maker is left with huge inventory of a worthless stock they have had to buy at a higher cost (as they are required to always provide a bid).

The majority of the times a stock is not crashing or spiking. So this is not a valid argument. Also there is no guarantee that they will make money. There are no hand-outs and everyone assumes some risk.

Third keep in mind, that regardless the direction or volatility in the market, there are buyers or sellers. Even as a security tanks, if there is volume on the security, then there are people buying.
 
Flash crashes have shown us just how few limit orders there are without market makers outside a narrow band.
Yeah but they all stop crashing and start recovering sometimes immediately in the same session. Ever wonder why?
 
From a book call the Wall Street Gang by Richard Ney. this book is 44 years old. It is somewhat outdated but Wall Street is still Wall Street.
"The main job of the market maker is supposed to be keeping an "orderly" market in the stock that he is making a market for. If someone wants to buy the stock that he is the market maker for, he is supposed to keep a supply of stock on hand and sell it to the buyer, if there's no sellers in that stock available at that moment. If someone wants to sell and there are no buyers at that moment, the market maker is suppose to buy the stock
If you want to buy or sell large blocks of 1,000,000 etc.shares of stock in a certain company, it is a rule that the market maker be notified in advance of putting your large block of stock to sell or your order to buy on the market. You can't just surprise the market maker with large blocks of stock orders.So the market maker has the inside special privilege to know how much stock people want to buy or sell. With such knowledge the market maker can "move the market" in his stock and increase or decrease the price of his stock based on the law of supply and demand. If he has an order or orders to buy large blocks of stock,he can support the stock and take the price higher knowing that his large block buy order{s} will help him support the price of the stock.If he has large block sell orders for his stock, he can move the price lower knowing that he must eventually fill the sell order for the large block seller. In the course of his buying or selling large blocks of stock, he c
News dissemination helps the market maker move the stock in the direction he desires it to go_One of the most important rules of The New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, which helps the market maker make huge amonts of money, is that when a company has an important news announcement to make that will seriously affect the price of the stock, the company must tell the important news to the market maker {"specialist"} about 30 days in advance of releasing the news to the general public.This is supposedly done to allow the market maker keep an "orderly" market in the stock he trades, but as any stock market professional knows this would normally be considered "insider" information. It is illegal for any ordinary individual to use insider information to make a trade in a stock and profit from knowing the news on that stock before the information is released to the public. WHAT A GREAT DEAL FOR THE MARKET MAKER. He can legally profit from knowing insider information of a cocrooks who control the markets can manipulate the markets to buy stocks at wholesale prices and sell them at retail prices to an unsuspecting public.Some people may have a hard time believing this possibility because they have been programmed by the media that the crooks control, to believe that the stock market is a legitimate market that randomly moves up or down on a daily basis without any influence by anyone. Nothing could be farther from the truth!
THESE CROOKS ARE MASTER THIEVES!!!>>> THEY'RE THE GREATEST CON ARTISTS IN THE WORLD!!!
In a normal business, when you want to get rid of some product and sell it, you have a sale and "substancially lower the price" of the product you want to sell. In the stock market when the market maker wants to have a big "sale" and cash in the profits that he has made from the stock he has accumulated over a period of time {at lower prices}, he "substancially raises" the price of the stock that he makes a market for so he can easily easily sell his product---stock certificates..In order for him to do this, news stories or analyst recommendations may conveniently appear to get peoples attention. Ordinary unsuspecting investors may get excited to buy this stock as they see the price go up substancially. The market maker then easily sells his own stock that he has previously bought at lower "wholesale" prices.
When the market maker
Probably the geatest way the market makers and insiders make their biggest profits is by a using an ingenious legal stock trading method called "SHORT SELLING." Whoever thought this one up was a major genius.Very few of the general public are aware that "short selling" even exists.Few if any brokerage firms ever advise their clients to "SELL SHORT." Investors are told how to make money when stocks go up ,but they are not told "how to make a profit when stocks go down." This is like telling a person half the rules in a game of poker or blackjack. The investing public is given only half the rules in the stock market casino, while the market makers play the stock market game with all the crooked rules that they made so they could always control the markets and make huge multi-trillions of dollars for themselves.
"WHAT IS SHORT SELLING???," YOU MAY ASK. Short selling allows a trader or investor to make money when a stock's price goes DOWN. "Well how can that be???," you may ask. Very simple and pure genius. Please follow this carefully,because you're not use to hearing how this technique works. When you place a "buy" order for a stock, you are buying the stock with the expectation that the price of the stock will go up and you will then make a profit. If the price goes down you lose your money. When you enter an order to "sell short," you are placing an order to "sell" a stock at the going market price with the expectation that you will make a profit if the stock goes DOWN.
Here's how this legal trade works plus wait till you hear how the market makers use this trading technique to really steal your money!!! When you enter your order to sell short, in essence you are selling the stock before you buy it. You are selling stock that you don't own. "How can you sell something you don't own," you may ask??? Now this is pure genius and you've got to hand it to the MASTER CROOKS OF WALL STREET. THESES CROOKS HAVE MADE A RULE THAT YOU CAN SELL SOMETHING YOU DON'T OWN. After all it's all only worthless paper stock certificates , so what difference does it make??? Here's how it works. You sell the stock at the going market price and temporarily borrow the stock from a brokerage firm, who will temporarily "loan" you the stock the stock they have on hand, so the stock can be legally and officially delivered to the buyer.
"But how do you make money selling this stock short???," "you may ask. After you have sold the stock and temporarily borrowed the stock and the stock was delivered to the buyer, you must now pay back to the brokerage house the stock that you "borrowed." Let's say you sold 100 shares of xyz stock "short" at $100. The stock goes DOWN to $50.You are obligated to pay back the stock you temporarily borrowed from the brokerage house.You now go into the market and "buy" 100 shares of xyz stock at $50 and your stock is given back to the brokerage house that you borrowed it from. You've completed the trade and made $50 per share or $5,000. You simply did a buy/sell trade in reverse. You first sold and then bought. If the price of the stock would've gone "up" you would have lost your money.To put it another way,you bet that the price of the stock would "go down" in the stock market casino and you WON.
But wait you ain't heard nothing yet. If you're a market maker you can "go naked" as they say and sell a "worthless paper stock certificate" without even going to all the trouble of borrowing it. I hope you're starting to get the picture. While all the suckers are happily and frantically buying overpriced "worthless pieces of paper" at extremely high prices as in the bull market of 1999-2000,
the market makers {specialists} were all busy "selling" you your stock that they didn't even own>>>the market makers were, that's right everybody, the market makers were 'selling short naked." All the news media that Wall Street controls was being utilized to get ordinary investors or pension funds or mutual funds to BUY BUY BUYstock while the market makers were "selling short." Stock market analysts working for the crooked investment bankers and brokerage houses were telling their clients to buy sto
If you wanted 1000 shares of xyz stock at $200, no problem, here's a thousand shares for you, SUCKER.You can buy this 'worthless stock certificate" in a new dot.com company that had very little sales and was not making any money. The "paper value"of the dot.com company may have been a billion or two billion dollars or even more {number of shares outstanding multiplied by the price of each share of stock}. Remember,the market maker did not have to legally own the stock he sold you. He wouldn't be foolish enough to pay high "retail prices" for a "worthless piece of paper." After he got your money, he could wait a few months or a year or more and "cover" his short sale by buying back the xyz stock at "wholesale'" prices of let's say $5 a share and make a profit of $195 on each of the 1000 shares of xyz stock that he sold you at $200 a share, for a total profit of $195,000!
Remember the job of the market maker is to keep an "orderly" market in the stock that he makATT etc.} , continue to go even lower. THE WALL STREET GANG IS GETTING AWAY WITH A THEFT OF TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS AND NO ONE IS GOING TO JAIL!!!
Can you imagine how many billions of dollars the Wall Street Gang made in Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossings, Juniper Networks, Lucient and all the other Corporations whose stocks went DOWN from the highs of $50, $90, $200 to their present price of 6 cents to $5??? TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS WERE STOLEN BY THE WALL STREET GANG BY THEIR USE OF "SHORT SELLING TECHNIQUES."
If the unsuspecting pulbic would wake up and demand an outside uncorrupted public investigation into the stock, bond, commodity and currency markets and see the truth about what is going on, they would be so appalled and so shocked, one would not even want to guess at what they might do with their anger!!! Forget about any government investigation, THE CROOKS ARE THE GOVERNMENT>>>The President, Vice President, Congressmen, Senators, the head of the Federal Reserve>>>they're all in on it. You don't have to believe this, just have a major citizens investigation and let's see what we find. After all Enron is real and many thousands of people lost billions of dollars of their money to the crooks in Enron. Is the former C.E.o_Of Enron, Ken Lay,{Kenny Boy as President George Bush calls his friend} in jail yet??? President Bush has even tried to get legislation approved that would allow the American taxpayers to be able to "invest" their hard earned soc
When all was said and done, the public, pension funds and mutual funds lost multi-trillions of dollars in the bull market of the latter '90's, and continue to lose even more. In a casino when someone loses the casino wins. THE WALL STREET GANG WON TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF THE SUCKERS MONEY.They will continue to win and get away with their crimes as long as people don't know the truth. "
From a book call the Wall Street Gang by Richard Ney. this book is 44 years old. It is somewhat outdated but Wall Street is still Wall Street.
with additional comment by Michael Shore
You sir must be as old as I am. I have not heard his name mentioned for a long time.
 
I assume Equity MMs have some type of global system to compare baskets of stocks with the ETFs and make small two sided markets around all stocks that they can hedge out market risk with ETFs and futures.
Most of the market making occurs within a single asset and is based on the state of the various order books across multiple exchanges. Conceptually, it is fairly simple - you show bids and offers, trying to retain priority as much as you can and hoping to have trades bounce between bid and ask.

Your worst fear is negative selection so you end up doing two things - skewing your markets based on various alpha signals and having an adversity model that would cause you to pull these orders. That could be either based on the information specific to this particular stock or based on the broad market. For example, as an MM you probably have an MW feed from up north and can react quickly to moves in ES, but it's not likely you trade the ES unless really forced to.
 
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