Stock Market Investors - Buy Stocks, Sell Stocks
Many investors and speculators buy stocks on margin (partial payment), paying only a portion of the cost. If the market drops far enough that their down-payment equals the loss on their stock, they then must immediately send more money to the brokerage firm that they bought it through. If investors do not respond to the margin call for additional money, their brokerage will sell their stock at any price, without their permission, and send them a bill if the brokerage had to pay the difference between their customers’ down payment and the selling price. In such a case the investor has not only lost their stock or bonds and a chance to recoup their losses when that stock or bond regains market value, they may be saddled with additional debt to pay for losses beyond their control.
While your broker is trying to get you the best deal available, you are actually competing with your broker’s company to buy and sell stocks. Brokerages invest heavily in stocks, bonds and commodities, speculating for their own profit. So if you want to sell a stock that their chief strategists believe is going to go up, they will not necessarily inform you. More likely they will buy your stock from you and be quite happy to have you contribute to their welfare. Likewise, if you want to buy stock that they believe is going down, they will tell you so if they don’t own any, or they will sell you theirs and remain happily silent. The real competition between you and your brokerage firm happens when you both want to buy or sell. In that case your brokerage will sell or buy a number of stock orders through the same specialist at the same relative time, and yours will be the ones with the least gains, making the ones with the most gains their trades. Brokerage firms look out for themselves at everyone’s expense, including their valued customers.
Each stock transaction determines the value of all of the stock for a company. When one trade of 100 shares, usually the minimum amount which can be bought or sold, is made at a price above or below any current price, the value of all of a company’s stock is considered to have risen or fallen by that same amount. And though many investors do not buy or sell on a daily basis, they still watch their stocks and note how their perceived net worth has increased or decreased as their stocks move up or down. The greatest of fallacies is the belief that one’s stocks are worth the prices quoted daily in the paper. Only a small percentage of any company’s stock needs to be placed on the market and sold at any price to wreak havoc in the value of all of that particular stock. A company’s stock is worthless as soon as investors are unwilling to own all of it. By this I mean, if more of its stock is offered than the market can find buyers at any price, the value of all of that company’s stock falls to zero, (no demand, no value).
All stocks are in a false equilibrium day to day. Barring some catastrophe in the world in general, or some segment of our economy in particular, a stock’s equilibrium is established by its previous day’s activity. Each daily close of the markets establishes a new point from which gains or losses are measured. But since it is buyers and sellers who define this equilibrium, the ratio of buyers to sellers is very important to the value of a company’s stock.
If there were an infinite number of buyers and sellers available to a market, it would be fairly stagnant and nearly impossible to crash. But there are only a finite number of buyers and sellers; both sides draw from the same pool of speculators and investors. Whenever the market falls, it is likely that many would-be buyers will become sellers, and many who were on the sidelines will step in to sell their stocks and avoid further losses. If sufficient pressure to sell stocks at any price occurs, even if only in one sector of the market, it can attract cash from other sectors, consume that capital and thereby reduce the cash available to support values in other markets. Pressure to sell for lower prices in one market can produce a downward momentum for all of the markets. As new prices are established at lower levels, equity is lost across the board, both for sellers and for owners who remain on the sideline hoping for stability. With any major loss of equity in one market, those needing to cover their losses may transfer or borrow capital from other areas of the economy to balance account sheets at brokerage firms. The loss of capital to investors in those other markets will cause prices to fall for them as well.
In 1987, many small investors could not get out of the stock market before being wiped out. This was not only a result of it being impossible to get through to your broker by phone, since many thousands of other investors were doing as you were. Your broker’s company had two things to gain by your losses. It could sell its own stock first and consume what little demand may have existed to buy stocks, and it could keep your stock off the market to prevent prices falling even lower. When supply of anything exceeds demand, prices will fall relative to the available surplus and any demand to consume that surplus.
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