How can this stock have an intra-day range of more than 90% on 24Aug2015?
"EDIT: It was System Disruption or Malfunctions August 24, 2015 2:12 PM EDT   Pursuant to Rule 11890(b) NASDAQ, on its own motion, in conjunction   with BATS, and FINRA has determined to cancel all trades in security   Blackrock Capital Investment. (Nasdaq: BKCC) at or below $5.86 that   were executed in NASDAQ between 09:38:00 and 09:46:00 ET. This   decision cannot be appealed. NASDAQ will be canceling trades on the   participants behalf. A person on Reddit claimed that he was the buyer. He used Robinhood, a $0 commission broker and start-up.  The canceled trades are reflected on CTA/UTP and the current charts will differ from the one posted below.  It is an undesired effect of the 5-minute Trading Halt.  It is not ""within 1 hour of opening, BKCC traded between $0.97 and $9.5"".  Those trades only occurred for a few seconds on two occasions.  One possible reason is that when the trading halt ended, there was a lot of Market Order to sell accumulated.  Refer to the following chart, where each candle represents a 10 second period. As you can see, the low prices did not ""sustain"" for hours.   And the published halts." "As you know, the market is in turmoil today. At this moment, 11:45 am, the S&P is down 2.3%, 45 points. But, premarket, it was down 100 points.  Now, premarket, I heard Jim Cramer say, ""today is not the day to use market orders."" Yes, on Mad Money, he seems a bit eccentric, but he does offer some wise advice at times.  In my opinion, your stock had some people that did just that. A market order. And, regardless of the fundamentals of this company, buyers had no orders to buy. Except a couple wise guys (in both senses) that put in buys at crazy prices. And they filled. With an Apple, trading around $100, the book probably has millions of shares on order with a buy at $80 or higher. Just an example. I'd bet there were a number of stocks that had the profile of yours, i.e. a chart reflecting trades similar to a flash crash. There are some traders smiling ear to ear, and some crying in their beer.     (Note - I use the phrase ""in my opinion."" This is the only explanation I can imagine. Occam's Razor.)"
There are lots of good answers on here already.  There are actually lots of answers for this question.  Lots.  I have years of experience on the exchange feed side and there are hundreds and thousands of variables.   All of these variables are funneled into systems owned by large financial institutions (I used to manage these - and only a few companies in the world do this so not hard to guess who I work for).  Their computers then make trades based on all of these variables and equations.  There are variables as whacky as how many times was a company mentioned in an aggregate news feed down to your basic company financials.  But if there is a way to measure a company (or to just guess) there is an equation for it plugged into a super computer at a big bank. Now there are two important factors on why you see this mad dash in the morning: Now most of the rest of the day is also automated trades but by the time you are an hour into market open the computers for the most part have fulfilled their calendar buys.  Everyone else's answer is right too.  There is futures contracts that change, global exchange info changes, options expiring, basic news, whatever but all of these are amplified by the calendar day changing. "You are interpreting things wrong.  Indian Infotech and Software Ltd (BOM:509051) clearly has volume and trades.  The MoneyControl site says  Your words like ""Nobody is selling the stock"" and ""no trade going on"" are completely unfounded." A 15% discount is a 17.6% return. (100/85 = 1.176). For a holding period that's an average 15.5 days, a half month. It would be silly to compound this over a year as the numbers are limited.  The safest way to do this is to sell the day you are permitted. In effect, you are betting, 12 times a year, that the stock won't drop 15% in 3 days. You can pull data going back decades, or as long as your company has been public, and run a spreadsheet to see how many times, if at all, the stock has seen this kind of volatility over 3 day periods. Even for volatile stocks, a 15% move is pretty large, you're likely to find your stock doing this less than once per year. It's also safest to not accumulate too many shares of your company for multiple reasons, having to do with risk spreading, diversification, etc.  2 additional points -  the Brexit just caused the S&P to drop 4% over the last 3 days trading. This was a major world event, but, on average we are down 4%. One would have to be very unlucky to have their stock drop 15% over the specific 3 days we are discussing.  The dollars at risk are minimal. Say you make $120K/yr. $10K/month. 15% of this is $1500 and you are buying $1765 worth of stock. The gains, on average are expected to be $265/mo. Doesn't seem like too much, but it's $3180 over a years' time. $3180 in profit for a maximum $1500 at risk at any month's cycle. "I assume that whatever you're holding has lost a considerable amount of its value then? What sort of instrument are we talking about? If the margin call is 14k on something you borrowed against the 6900 you're a bit more leveraged than ""just"" another 100%. The trading company you're using should be able to tell you exactly what happens if you can't cover the margin call, but my hunch is that selling and taking the cash out ceased to be an option roughly at the time they issued the margin call. Being labelled as a day trader or not most likely did not have anything to do with that margin call - they're normally issued when one or more of your leveraged trades tank and you don't have enough money in the account to cover the shortfall. Not trying to sound patronising but the fact that you needed to ask this question suggests to me that you shouldn't have traded with borrowed money in the first place." "IT appears the company you're talking about did not report as you expected them to, which is not unusual for OTC companies because, as Milo stated, they are not well-managed. That being said, reports on EDGAR are available as soon as they're posted.  I'm not aware of any lag between when the company uploads their report and it is available on the EDGAR site. Looking at the profile of the company you're referring to, I'm curious why you'd be so interested in a company with huge negative earnings, a near-zero share price, and an obviously spotty history of reporting its numbers.  In order to make any money with this stock, you'd have to buy a huge number of shares, which could be difficult to unload.  Further, the fees you're going to pay to make your trades are very likely to outstrip your return, so you'd be upside down on it. This company has pretty negative financials, and in a world of cheap oil, alternative energy (and the companies that deal in it) are out of vogue, so they're not likely to see a turnaround anytime soon.  They're spending money on R & D at a rate almost 17 times earnings, and the losses are deepening, while revenues are not improving all that much.  These guys are bleeding to death, and there's little prospect of a financial transfusion on the horizon. This is, as they say, a ""dog with fleas"", so your best bet is to find something else to put your money into. I hope this helps. Good luck!" How is it possible that a publicly traded investment company's net asset value per share is higher than their share price? Wouldn't you (in theory) be able to buy the company and liquidate it to make a profit of (NAV/share - price/share)*number of shares, ignoring transaction costs and such?   I realize that since part of their portfolio is in private equity, NAV is hard to calculate and hard to liquidate as well, but it doesn't really seem to make sense to me. Would love some input.   The company I'm talking about in this instance is 180 Degree Capital Corp, but this isn't the first time I've seen this. Have you owned the stock for longer than 2015?  The stock appears to have grown in value since December 2014 from 72.85 to 73.5 which is about 0.89% growth in the year to date (2015). "The simple answer could be that one or more ""people"" decided to buy. By ""people,"" I don't mean individual buyers of 100 shares like you or me, but typically large institutional investors like Fidelity, who might buy millions of shares at a time. Or if you're talking about a human person, perhaps someone like Warren Buffett. In a ""thinly"" traded small cap stock that typically trades a few hundred shares in a day, an order for ""thousands"" could significantly move the price. This is one situation where more or less ""average"" people could move a single stock." the strategy is tested all the way to 97. how is the continuous series backadjusted? the emini is rolledover and Ratio back adjusted to the 2nd nearest contract, 9 days prior to expiration. since it is an intraday trade, the discrepancy to the real thing should be next to irrelevant. but comparing it to the spx could make it interesting.  what would be a good format to present the results ? jpeg? pdf ? I still can't understand why there is a price discrepancancy.  There isn't. It's the same stock and price differences between such major exchanges will always be minimal. I think you simply haven't paid attention to the date range. It seems Google finance only has data for FRA:BMW reaching back to 2011, so if you try to look at the development of your investment since 2009, you're not getting comparable data. If you look at a trade grid you can see how this happens. If there are enough bids to cover all shares currently on the sell side at a certain price, those shares will be bought and increased price quotes will be shown for the bids and ask. If there are enough bids to cover this price, those will get bought and higher prices will be shown and this process will repeat until the sell side has more power than the buy side. It seems like this process is going on all day long with momentum either on the upside or downside. But I think that much of this bidding and selling is automatic and is being done by large trading firms and high tech computers. I also feel that many of these bids and asks are already programmed to appear once there is a price change. So once one price gets bought, computers will put in higher bids to take over asks. It's like a virtual war between trading firms and their computers. When more money is on the buy side the stock will go up, and vice versa. I sort of feel like this high-frequency trading is detrimental to the markets and doesn't really give everyone a fair shot. Retail investors do not have the resources and knowledge in order to do this sort of high frequency trading. It also seems to go against certain free market principles in my opinion. "First, I would like to use a better chart.  In my opinion, a close of day line chart obscures a lot of important information.  Here is a daily OHLC log chart:  The initial drop from the 1099.23 close on Oct 3 was to 839.8 intraday, to close at 899.22 on Oct 10.  After this the market was still very volatile and reached a low of 747.78 on Nov 20, closing only slightly higher than this.  It traded as high as 934.70 on Jan 6, 2009, but the whole period of Nov 24 - Feb 13 was somewhat of a trading range of roughly 800-900.  Despite this, the news reports of the time were frequently saying things like ""this isn't going to be a V shaped recovery, it is going to be U shaped.""  The roughly one week dip you see Feb 27 - Mar 9 taking it to an intraday low of 666.79 (only about 11% below the previous low) on first glance appears to be just a continuation of the previous trend.   However... The Mar 10 uptrend started with various news articles (such as this one) which I recall at the time suggested things like reinstating the parts of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 which had been repealed by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act.  Although these attempts appear to have been unsuccessful, the widespread telegraphing of such attempts in the media seemed to have reversed a common notion which I saw widespread on forums and other places that, ""we are going to be in this mess forever, the market has nowhere to go but down, and therefore shorting the market is a good idea now.""  I don't find the article itself, but one prominent theme was the ""up-tick"" rule on short selling: source From this viewpoint, then, that the last dip was driven not so much by a recognition that the economy was really in the toilet (as this really was discounted in the first drop and at least by late November had already been figured into the price).  Instead, it was sort of the opposite of a market top, where now you started seeing individual investors jump on the band-wagon and decide that now was the time for a foray into selling (short).  The fact that the up-tick rule was likely to be re-instated had a noticeable effect on halting the final slide." "During market hours, there are a lot of dealers offering to buy and sell all exchange traded stocks. Dealers don't actually care about the company's fundamentals and they set their prices purely based on order flow. If more people start to buy than sell, the dealer notices his inventory going down and starts upping the price (both his bid and ask). There are also traders who may not be ""dealers"", but are willing to sell if the price goes high enough or buy if the price goes low enough. This keeps the prices humming along smoothly. During normal trading hours, if you buy something and turn around and sell it two minutes later, you'll probably be losing a couple cents per share. Outside normal market hours, the dealers who continue to have a bid and ask listed know that they don't have access to good price information --  there isn't a liquid market of continuous buying and selling for the dealer to set prices he considers safe. So what does he do? He widens the spread. He doesn't know what the market will open tomorrow at and doesn't know if he'll be able to react quickly to news. So instead of bidding $34.48 and offering at $34.52, he'll move that out to $33 and $36. The dealer still makes money sometimes off this because maybe some trader realized that he has options expiring tomorrow, or a short position that he's going to get a margin call on, or some kind of event that pretty much forces him to trade. Or maybe he's just panicking and overreacting to some news. So why not trade after hours? Because there's no liquidity, and trading when there's no liquidity costs you a lot." Matt Levine talked about a cute scam that this resembles, a kind of extended short squeeze. You manipulate up the stock of a company, so that it's obviously way above the fundamental value. Word will get out. Then the shorts come in. But the value remains stubbornly high. All the stock is held by a few insiders, but they didn't manipulate the stock price to do a pump and dump. They did it to milk the shorts on borrow cost. Like others have said, mutual funds don't have an intraday NAV, but their ETF equivalents do. Use something like Yahoo Finance and search for the ETF.IV. For example VOO.IV. This will give you not the ETF price (which may be at a premium or discount), but the value of the underlying securities updated every 15 seconds.