Saturday, February 7, 2009

An Introduction to NASDAQ

By John Border

NASDAQ though called an exchange works in method called double action whereby the highest bidder buyer competes with all other buyers and the same thing happens for the sellers. NASDAQ as an exchange is not very old but has been giving good competition to the established exchange like the NYSE.

Now for NASDAQ the auction method does not work, it is like a series of dealers which are selling stocks and each dealer has some sort of inventory of stocks as well as cash. Now NASDAQ is completely automated so going by above analogy you do not visit each dealer shop instead the computer system visits the store of each dealer and checks what prices and how much shares does each dealer have to satisfy an order.

Now there are two types of orders market order and limit order. Let us say that you have a limit order which means that you are neither willing to buy above that set limit nor willing to sell below that price. Market order means that you are saying that at whatever price the dealer is holding the inventory the system should go ahead an buy that. So what happens when the dealer only has 500 shares and you place an order for buying 1000 shares at market price? For the fulfillment of this order you will get 500 shares of the order at the stated price and another 500 shares at the price the dealer says it got somebody to sell the shares to you. Now this price may be higher or below the price at which you got the initial 500 shares.

NASDAQ as you can see is the interdealer market represented by securities dealers and these dealers are called market makers. These dealers then compete with each other to post their best prices (both bid and ask). A normal non professional person can have access to this bid offers, ask size, size of each offer and they are called level II quotes. The system that provide the quotes is called Small Order Execution System.

In conclusion, NASDAQ seems to favor the small investor like you and me for trading and that is all that matters in the stock trading arena.However there are other exchnages which can help really really small investor with special deals and cash only options like the American Exchange.

If you need to trade in penny stocks then what you need is trading in OTCBB. But be careful as penny stock trading is very risky and volatile.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment