Latest stock market news videos & Morning Bell

Hello, I’m Jessica Amir with Bell Direct.

When you’re buying and selling shares you can simply buy or sell at the current market price, which is most common and the market will set the price for you or, you can enter a specific price and this is called a limit.

What you need to know is when you place a trade at the market price by ticking market to limit, the market will set your price based on the buys and sells taking place and your trade will generally be guaranteed to go through and that’s that.

Alternatively if you want to buy or sell at a specific price, called a limit, you can do that but your trade is generally not guaranteed to go through as the market price may change and the price you’ve entered may be higher or lower than what the market wants.

So today we’ll cover how to look at where the buys and sell orders are, known as the market depth.

Once you’ve logged into Bell Direct, type in the ticker code that you want via the quote feature here, hit enter.

Beneath the performance chart you’ll see today’s trades, market detail, company details and company fundamentals.

Market detail is where you see the market depth, this is where the action happens for the stock that you want to trade.

You can see what price people are prepared to buy the stock at and what price and how many shares these investors want to sell.

We can also see the last trader price or if it’s before 10am, what the indicative price is, meaning what the price will likely hit based on the buys and sell orders in the market.

You can see the day’s percentage move where the stock opened, the highest price it reached, the low for the day, the number of trades and the average dollar amount traded down the bottom.

You can see the amount of buyers and the number of shares being bought versus the number of sellers and the number of shares being sold.

Alternatively, if you’re hungry for more detail, you can pop this out in a chart format by clicking here.

It has the same info as the previous page but it’s in graph form and has a little more info.

So you can see how the stock is trading, you will also see the bid which is the highest price a buyer is willing to pay for the stock and the ask, which is the lowest price a seller is willing to sell their stock at.

So if I wanted to buy or sell a stock today and wanted to use a price limit, I tick limit.

I might just want to see where the biggest clusters of trades are to increase my chances of my order going through, so remember we know this is where the stock is trading.

Current price up here, but let’s scan down to see those that are selling their shares in the market.

So I can see there are more sell orders here at this price level and looking at the buy orders.

I can see the most buys are around this price, here the highest buy price becomes the bid and the lowest sell price is the ask, so if it’s a volatile stock and I wanted to buy today I could buy it on the market right now by selecting market to limit or I can enter a buy order using a limit where I see the most support.

Alternatively, if you wanted another different visual display you could look at the market depth pop out chart.

This green line represents the current price of the stock, the yellow line represents the average price for the security in the trading session, the blue line represent buys with the price below.

So simply, this tells us there is a lot more demand to buy this stock at this level and the red lines represent cells and the vertical line here represents volume showing the most cells for the stock here.

And that’s it!

So when buying or selling shares you can do it at the market price where the market sets the price for you, which is most common or, you can see where the price action is and enter a trade where the most support is using a limit.

For more information, chat to us online or why not check out our other demo videos on BDTV.

Happy trading.