What is buying power in stocks?
Your buying power is the money you have available to purchase securities. In a cash account, your buying power is your settled cash. In a margin account, you do not have to wait for cash to settle, and your cash may be leveraged to increase your buying power.
What is the process for the stock return?
The process for the stock return is: In the equation of the stochastic process of the stock price, the drift, a (S, t), and the diffusion coefficient, b {St, t), are now proportional to the stock price: The coefficients [i and o are constant, but the drift and the diffusion terms depend on S.
What are the forces that move stock prices?
Forces That Move Stock Prices 1 Fundamental Factors. An owner of common stock has a claim on earnings, and earnings per share (EPS) is the owner's return on his or her investment. 2 Technical Factors. Things would be easier if only fundamental factors set stock prices. ... 3 News. ... 4 Market Sentiment. ... 5 The Bottom Line. ...
Is the stock price process an Ito process?
The stock price process is a special case of an Ito process. For stock prices, the return is randomly distributed normally and i.i.d. because stock price returns are supposed to have a positive trend plus random deviations independent from past deviations, in line with the efficiency hypothesis of stock markets.

What are positives of stocks?
Key Benefits of Investing In StocksBuild. Historically, long-term equity returns have been better than returns from cash or fixed-income investments such as bonds. ... Protect. Taxes and inflation can impact your wealth. ... Maximize. ... Common shares.Capital growth. ... Dividend income. ... Voting privileges. ... Liquidity.More items...
What is stock price process?
Stock prices are stochastic processes in discrete time which take only discrete values due to the limited measurement scale. Nevertheless, stochastic processes in continuous time are used as models since they are analytically easier to handle than discrete models, e.g. the binomial or trinomial process.
What is a positive catalyst in stocks?
"The catalyst for the stock's 40% upswing was a stronger-than-expected earnings report." or. "The catalyst for the multiple downgrades of XYZ was the company's multiple FDA rejections." Examples of positive catalysts might be: stronger than expected earnings, upgrades, positive news from the FDA, signing of a new deal.
What are 4 factors that affect stock prices?
Factors that can affect stock pricesnews releases on earnings and profits, and future estimated earnings.announcement of dividends.introduction of a new product or a product recall.securing a new large contract.employee layoffs.anticipated takeover or merger.a change of management.accounting errors or scandals.
Why stock price is important for a company?
A company's stock price reflects investor perception of its ability to earn and grow its profits in the future. If shareholders are happy, and the company is doing well, as reflected by its share price, the management would likely remain and receive increases in compensation.
What determines the stock price?
After a company goes public, and its shares start trading on a stock exchange, its share price is determined by supply and demand for its shares in the market. If there is a high demand for its shares due to favorable factors, the price will increase.
How do you identify a stock catalyst?
Volatility: How Wild Moves Can Create Opportunity Volatility is another key factor to look for when a catalyst moves a stock. It's a measure of how quickly a stock's price moves up or down over a given period of time. Basically, the faster it moves, the higher the volatility.
How do you find the catalyst of a stock?
2:078:01Stock Catalysts - How to Find the Sweet Spot for Entering a TradeYouTubeStart of suggested clipEnd of suggested clipUp more than 5% a day focus on them. My second favorite catalyst is the contract winners and the newMoreUp more than 5% a day focus on them. My second favorite catalyst is the contract winners and the new product announcements. Many many of these stacks are what you would call speculative.
What is catalytic effect?
If you describe a person or thing as having a catalytic effect, you mean that they cause things to happen or they increase the speed at which things happen. [formal] Governments do, however, have a vital catalytic role in orchestrating rescue operations.
What is the most important factor that affects the value of a stock?
Supply and Demand This is one of the most common factors affecting stock prices. Imbalance between supply and demand can significantly affect stock prices. If there's a demand for the stock of a particular company and its supply is less, then it's price will escalate and vice-versa.
What causes share prices to rise?
The main factors that determine whether a share price moves up or down are supply and demand. Essentially, if more people want to buy a share than sell it, the price will rise because the share is more sought-after (the 'demand' outstrips the 'supply').
How does a stock price change?
When the demand for a stock exceeds supply, there will be a rise in the price of a stock. The more drastic the demand-supply gap, the higher the price. For example, when many traders are buying stock X, stock X's price per share will increase and the same is true vice-versa.
How are stock prices determined during for the IPO?
Strong demand for the company will lead to a higher stock price. In addition to the demand for a company's shares, there are several other factors that determine an IPO valuation, including industry comparables, growth prospects, and the story of a company.
How do you read a stock price?
If you see, for example, $124.61 as the bid, investors are currently willing to buy the stock at a price of $124.61 per share. The ask, on the other hand, is the lowest price an investor is willing to sell a stock for. If you see an ask of $124.65, sellers are currently selling for $124.65 per share.
How do you read a stock price chart?
Key concepts when learning how to read a stock chartIdentify the trendline. This is that blue line you see every time you hear about a stock — it's either going up or down right? ... Look for lines of support and resistance. ... Know when dividends and stock splits occur. ... Understand historic trading volumes.
Why is it important to have a rate of return on savings?
This is crucial because inflation generally causes the prices of most things to rise over time.
Do stocks move randomly?
If you look at prices on a stock chart, they may seem to move randomly. In fact, prices do move randomly. But they often exhibit repeatable pattern that can be exploited. When we can identify these patterns, we can anticipate that direction of prices with a high degree of probability. So prices of stocks tend to move in trends like the way water moves in the current.
Why should we believe that something risky like U.S. stocks will provide us a positive expected return over cash?
stocks will provide us a positive expected return over cash? The classic answer is that when we buy a share of the company, we are providing financial capital to help grow and run the business — we are performing a service and should expect to be paid for it.
How many times do stocks beat cash?
So at a long enough horizon, it seems like a reasonable bet to say that stocks will return better than cash — with a 20 year investment horizon, stocks beat cash 7 out of 8 times.
How many simulations are there in the S&P 500?
Where each experiment consists itself of 5,000 one year simulations. Except now the expected returns of the S&P 500 and cash are no longer fixed; rather they are themselves random variables (that are distributed according to the Student’s t distribution) whose standard deviation is equal to their respective standard errors.
How much cash wins in simulations?
Recall that previously we found that cash wins 35% of the time (out of our 5,000 simulations). Let’s take a look at how the amount of time that we buy and hold for (the holding period) impacts the cash win percentage:
What is the most fundamental benchmark in finance?
Every financial decision that we make should be benchmarked appropriately. And the most fundamental benchmark in finance is the risk free rate — the rate of return that we can earn with zero effort and zero risk.
Why do we buy and hold?
We shouldn’t judge our investments in terms of days, weeks, or even months. We are investing to build long term wealth and to fund our retirements.
Is stock a sure bet?
So stocks remain one of our better bets to build real (inflation adjusted) wealth over long time horizons — but as we have seen, they are in no way a sure bet.
Why is the return of a stock randomly distributed?
because stock price returns are supposed to have a positive trend plus random deviations independent from past deviations , in line with the efficiency hypothesis of stock markets. Under the efficiency hypothesis, the return reacts to innovations, not to past information, which is embedded in the stock price.
What happens when the drift term is negative?
When S is above the constant [I, the drift term is negative, making negative variations of S more likely. The random variable might decline and revert to [l. If S is below [l, the drift term is positive and the random variable might increase and revert to [l. The parameter |^ represents a long-term trend. When moving away from this long-term trend the asset price tends to revert to it.
What is mean reverting process?
A mean reverting process intends to model processes that cannot drift away of some long-term value by a large magnitude for long periods:
Is the diffusion coefficient proportional to the stock price?
In the equation of the stochastic process of the stock price, the drift, a (S, t), and the diffusion coefficient, b {St, t), are now proportional to the stock price:
What is your buying power in stock trading?
In trading, your stock buying power is your ammo. Regardless of how strong your skill sets are, lack of ammo leaves you without an offense or a defense. Knowledge of your changing intraday buying power is crucial to assessing your risk thresholds and preventing self-inflicted wounds (IE: getting caught in a short squeeze). Knowing how much stock you can buy is determined by your buying power, and failing to monitor it can lead to big problems.
What is buying power?
Your buying power is your trading fuel and you should always pay attention to the fuel gauge. Consider your buying power before making any trade, and consider the margin maintenance requirements to make sure you have enough funds to trade without receiving a margin call.
Where Can I Find My Buying Power?
Every broker differs, but they all should show your buying power located in the account information in the platform.
What Happens If You Don’t Have Enough Buying Power?
If you don’t have enough buying power to place a trade, you can’t place the trade (simple as that). For example, if you want to buy $10,000 worth of stock but you only have $5,000 buying power, the trade will generally not go through.
How Does Leverage Work?
Leverage refers to how much cash you can borrow in your margin account for trades. Day trade margin accounts generally offer 4:1 intraday buying power and 2:1 overnight buying power on most widely traded stocks. This means you can put 25% of the costs down intraday and 50% of the costs down to hold positions overnight.
Why is forced liquidation important?
A forced liquidation adds more fuel to the fire as the broker buys shares to cover in the open market which can add more buying pressure causing the stock to squeeze even higher. This is why it’s important to monitor your buying power throughout the day, not just the price of your stock positions.
How does buying power change?
Buying power can change depending on the stock’s margin parameters which is at the discretion of your brokerage. Be aware that brokers have to constantly assess volatility risk throughout the day. If a stock or market exhibits extremely heavy volatility, the broker may bump up the margin requirement from 25% (4:1) to 50% (2:1) during the day. As the middleman that facilitates the trades between counterparties, the broker is on the line for potential losses if a trader doesn’t have the proper capital to handle the price swings and can initiate action to protect itself (liquidation of your positions or restriction on your ability to enter new positions) if you are over-leveraged or your account is overly-concentrated in a highly volatile position.

Fundamental Factors
Technical Factors
- Things would be easier if only fundamental factors set stock prices. Technical factors are the mix of external conditions that alter the supply of and demand for a company's stock. Some of these indirectly affect fundamentals. For example, economic growthindirectly contributes to earnings growth. Technical factors include the following.
News
- While it is hard to quantify the impact of news or unexpected developments inside a company, industry, or the global economy, you can't argue that it does influence investor sentiment. The political situation, negotiations between countries or companies, product breakthroughs, mergers and acquisitions, and other unforeseen events can impact stocks and the stock market. Since s…
Market Sentiment
- Market sentiment refers to the psychology of market participants, individually and collectively. This is perhaps the most vexing category. Market sentiment is often subjective, biased, and obstinate. For example, you can make a solid judgment about a stock's future growth prospects, and the future may even confirm your projections, but in the meantime, the market may myopica…
The Bottom Line
- Different types of investors depend on different factors. Short-term investors and traders tend to incorporate and may even prioritize technical factors. Long-term investors prioritize fundamentals and recognize that technical factors play an important role. Investors who believe strongly in fundamentals can reconcile themselves to technical forces with the following popular argument…
The Ito Process
- The Ito process is a generalized Wiener process where the coefficients, a and b, are function of the underlying variable S and of the time t: Drift and variance are, respectively a{St, t)At and b{St, t)Az, with variance being bSt, t)At. The drift and the variance rate are now dependent on Sand time. The stock price process is a special case of an Ito process.
The Stock Price Process
- For stock prices, the return is randomly distributed normally and i.i.d. because stock price returns are supposed to have a positive trend plus random deviations independent from past deviations, in line with the efficiency hypothesis of stock markets. Under the efficiency hypothesis, the return reacts to innovations, not to past information, which...
The Mean Reverting Process
- A mean reverting process intends to model processes that cannot drift away of some long-term value by a large magnitude for long periods: Sdesignates here a process followed by a market parameter, typically an interest rate, not a stock price. Such a model is inconsistent with the market efficiency which implies that stock returns are independent from past returns. When S is …
The "Rare Event" Process
- The "jump process" is used to model rare events. Rare events are abnormal jumps of stock prices. In this text, rare events also include defaults which follow a jump process. Rare events occur unexpectedly and their probability of occurrence increases with the time interval elapsed. The size of the event is not small, as it is with the usual normal distribution, even when the time interval i…