What does it mean when Share price and volume sales aren't negatively correlated?
When stocks have a change in price it is because of a TRADE. To have a trade you have to have both a buyer and a seller.  When the price of a security is going up there are an equal amount of shares being sold as being bought. When the price of a security is going down there are an equal amount of shares being bought as being sold.  There almost always is an unequal amount of shares waiting to be sold compared to the amount waiting to be bought. But waiting shares do not move the price, only when the purchase price and the sale price agree, and a trade occurs, does the price move.  So the price does not go down because more shares are being sold. Neither does the price go up because more shares are being bought.
Yep, you have it pretty much right.   The volume is the number of shares traded that day. The ticker is giving you the number of shares bought at that price in a given transaction, the arrow meaning whether the stock is up or down on the day at that price.   Institutional can also refer to pensions, mutuals funds, corporates; generally any shareholder that isn't an individual person. Stock price is based on supply and demand. Unless the stock you are looking to buy usually has very low volume trading 100 shares isn't likely to have any effect on price. There are many companies that have millions or tens of millions of shares trade daily. For stocks like that 100 shares is barely a trivial percentage of the daily volume. For thinly traded stocks you can look at the bid and ask size but even that isn't likely to get you an exact answer. Unless you are trading large volumes your trade will have no effect on the price of shares. "It is important to first understand that true causation of share price may not relate to historical correlation. Just like with scientific experiments, correlation does not imply causation. But we use stock price correlation to attempt to infer causation, where it is reasonable to do so. And to do that you need to understand that prices change for many reasons; some company specific, some industry specific, some market specific. Companies in the same industry may correlate when that industry goes up or down; companies with the same market may correlate when that market goes up or down. In general, in most industries, it is reasonable to assume that competitor companies have stocks which strongly correlate (positively) with each-other to the extent that they do the same thing.  For a simple example, consider three resource companies: ""Oil Ltd."" [100% of its assets relate to Oil]; ""Oil and Iron Inc."" [50% of its value relates to Oil, 50% to Iron]; and ""Iron and Copper Ltd."" [50% of its value relates to Iron, 50% to Copper]. For each of these companies, there are many things which affect value, but one could naively simplify things by saying ""value of a resource company is defined by the expected future volume of goods mined/drilled * the expected resource price, less all fixed and variable costs"". So, one major thing that impacts resource companies is simply the current & projected price of those resources. This means that if the price of Oil goes up or down, it will partially affect the value of the two Oil companies above - but how much it affects each company will depend on the volume of Oil it drills, and the timeline that it expects to get that Oil. For example, maybe Oil and Iron Ltd. has no currently producing Oil rigs, but it has just made massive investments which expect to drill Oil in 2 years - and the market expects Oil prices to return to a high value in 2 years.  In that case, a drop in Oil would impact Oil Inc. severely, but perhaps it wouldn't impact Oil and Iron Ltd. as much. In this case, for the particular share price movement related to the price of Oil, the two companies would not be correlated. Iron and Copper Ltd. would be unaffected by the price of Oil [this is a simplification; Oil prices impact many areas of the economy], and therefore there would be no correlation at all between this company's shares. It is also likely that competitors face similar markets. If consumer spending goes down, then perhaps the stock of most consumer product companies would go down as well. There would be outliers, because specific companies may still succeed in a falling market, but in generally, there would be a lot of correlation between two companies with the same market.  In the case that you list, Sony vs Samsung, there would be some factors that correlate positively, and some that correlate negatively. A clean example would be Blackberry stock vs Apple stock - because Apple's success had specifically negative ramifications for Blackberry. And yet, other tech company competitors also succeeded in the same time period, meaning they did not correlate negatively with Apple." Any time a large order it placed for Buy, the sell side starts increasing as the demand of Buy has gone up. [Vice Versa is also true]. Once this orders gets fulfilled, the demand drops and hence the Sell price should also lower. Depending on how much was the demand / supply without your order, the price fluctuation would vary. For examply if before your order, for this particular share the normal volume is around 100's of shares then you order would spike things up quite a bit. However if for other share the normal volume is around 100000's then your order would not have much impact. You should not look at volume in isolation but look at it together with other indicators and/or the release of news (good or bad). When there is lower than average volume this could be an indication that the stock is in a bit of a holding pattern, possibly waiting for some company or economic news to come out (especially when accompanied by small changes in price). It could also mean that trading in a certain direction is drying up and the trend is about to end (this could be accompanied with a large move in price). When there is higher than average volume (2 to 3 times more or higher), this could be due to the release of company results, company or economic news, or the start or end of a trend (especially if accompanied by a gap). A large increase in volume accompanied by a large fall in price (usually a gap down) may also be an indication the stock has gone ex-dividend. There could be a range of reasons for variations in volume to the average volume. That is why you need to look at other indicators, company reporting and news, and economic news in combination with the volume changes to get a grasp of what is really happening. No. The information you are describing is technical data about a stock's market price and trading volume, only. There is nothing implied in that data about a company's financial fundamentals (earnings/profitability, outstanding shares, market capitalization, dividends, balance sheet assets and liabilities, etc.) All you can infer is positive or negative momentum in the trading of the stock. If you want to understand if a company is performing well, then you need fundamental data about the company such as you would get from a company's annual and quarterly reports. Okay I don't know where my disconnect was, in my mind I was viewing that as a negative for some reason haha. Thanks! That makes sense.  What is your perspective on the large amount of companies buying back shares right now? I hovered over the label for trading volume and the following message popped up: Volume / average volume  Volume is the number of shares traded on the   latest trading day. The average volume is measured over 30 days. Stock prices reflect future expectations of large groups of people, and may not be directly linked to traditional valuations for a number of reasons (not definitive). For example, a service like Twitter is so popular that even though it has no significant revenue and loses money, people are simply betting that it is deeply embedded enough that it will eventually find some way to make money. You can also see a number of cases of IPOs of various types of companies that do not even have a revenue model at all. Also, if there is rapid sales growth in A but B sales are flat, no one is likely to expect future profit growth in B such that the valuation will remain steady. If sales in A are accelerating, there may be anticipation that future profits will be high. Sometimes there are also other reasons, such as if A owns valuable proprietary assets, that will hold the values up. However, more information about these companies' financials is really needed in order to understand why this would be the case. Large-scale price range of a stock isn't directly meaningful; that reflects how many shares exist, not just how desirable they are. A stock split, for example, doubles the number of shares everyone holds while cutting the value of each share in half; that's meaningless except that it makes the shares a bit easier to trade in. Change in price is more interesting. In the case of energy companies, that often reflects major changes in energy supply, distribution, use, or how well positioned people feel the company is for the next change in these. Fracking's surge and the questions raised against it, whether a major pipeline will or won't be built, international energy price trends, breakthroughs in renewables... if it might affect energy price, it might affect the company's strength, both absolute and relative to others. In other words, the same kinds of things that affect any stock. No.  Revenue is the company's gross income.  The stock price has no contribution to the company's income.  The stock price may be affected when the company's income deviates from what it was expected to be. A lower Price/Book Value means company is undervalued. It could also mean something horribly wrong. While it may look like a good deal, remember; Stock price is an indicator about the health of the company.  Increased profits (for example) will drive the stock price up; excessive debt (for example) will drive it down. The stock price has a profound effect on the company overall: for example, a declining share price will make it hard to secure credit, attract further investors, build partnerships, etc.  Also, employees are often holding options or in a stock purchase plan, so a declining share price can severely dampen morale. In an extreme case, if share prices plummet too far, the company can be pressured to reverse-split the shares, and (eventually) take the company private.  This recently happened to Playboy. Ideally, stock price reflects the value of the company, the dividends it is expected to pay, and what people expect the future value of the company to be. Only one of those (maybe one and a half) is related to current  sales, and not always directly. Short-term motion of a stock is even less directly linked, since it also reflects previous expectations. A company can announce disappointing sales and see its stock go up, if the previous price was based on expecting  worse news. It's a way to help normalize the meaning of the earnings report. Some companies like Google have a small number of publicly traded shares (322 Million). Others like Microsoft have much larger numbers of shares (8.3 Billion). The meaning depends on the stock. If it's a utility company that doesn't really grow, you don't want to see lots of changes -- the earnings per share should be stable. If it's a growth company, earnings should be growing quickly, and flat growth means that the stock is probably going down, especially if slow growth wasn't expected.