What happened to GOOG-stock? Why isn't it 1.000 USD?
The stock split, it is similar to what happened to Apple a little while back. When Google split 2 to 1, it means that each share holder got 2 shares for each 1 share they had and each share was 1/2 the price.
The price of the stock is not really relevant, as your return is measured as a percentage, 6% return on a $100 stock is the same as a 6% return on a $1 stock, you just hold 100 times more shares at the lower price. I personally really like Eurosun Mining ESM, they are greatly undervalued and have the potential to double or triple in the very near term. Too much fiddling with your portfolio if the difference is 3-4% or less (as it's become in recent months).  Hands off is the better advice.  As for buying shares, go for whichever is the cheapest (i.e. Goog rather than Googl) because the voting right with the latter is merely symbolic.  And who attends shareholders' meetings, for Pete's sake? On the other hand, if your holdings in the company are way up in the triple (maybe even quadruple) figures, then it might make sense to do the math and take the time to squeeze an extra percentage point or two out of your Googl purchases.  The idle rich occupying the exclusive club that includes only the top 1% of the population needs to have somethinng to do with its time.  Meanwhile, the rest of us are scrambling to make a living--leaving only enough time to visit our portfolios as often as Buffett advises (about twice a year). You would have sold at $10,000 or you’d be an absolute moron  Edit: or when it dipped from $1k to $300 if you held through that you’re either clinically tarded or forgot you owned it. Not even the creators held their bitcoins through this I will assume that you are not asking in the context of high frequency trading, as this is Personal Finance Stack Exchange. It is completely acceptable to trade odd lots for retail brokerage customers. The odd lot description that you provided in your link, from Interactive Brokers is correct. But even in that context, it says, regarding the acceptability of odd lots to stock exchanges: The exception is that odd lots can be routed to NYSE/ARCA/AMEX, but   only as part of a basket order or as a market-on-close (MOC) order. Google GOOG is traded on the NASDAQ. Everything on the NASDAQ is electronic, and always has been. You will have no problem selling or buying less than 100 shares of Google.  There is also an issue of higher commissions with odd lots: While trading commissions for odd lots may still be higher than for   standard lots on a percentage basis, the popularity of online trading   platforms and the consequent plunge in brokerage commissions means   that it is no longer as difficult or expensive for investors to   dispose of odd lots as it used to be in the past. Notice what it says about online trading making it easier, not more difficult, to trade odd lots. "To add on to the other answers, in asking why funds have different price points one might be asking why stocks aren't normalized so a unit price of $196 in one stock can be directly compared to the same price in another stock.  While this might not make sense with AAPL vs. GOOG (it would be like comparing apples to oranges, pun intended, not to mention how would two different companies ever come to such an agreement) it does seem like it would make more sense when tracking an index.  And in fact less agreement between different funds would be required as some ""natural"" price points exist such as dividing by 100 (like some S&P funds do). However, there are a couple of reasons why two different funds might price their shares of the same underlying index differently. Demand - If there are a lot of people wanting the issue, more shares might be issued at a lower price.  Or, there might be a lot of demand centered on a certain price range. Pricing - shares that are priced higher will find fewer buyers, because it makes it harder to buy round lots (100 shares at $100/share is $10,000 while at $10/share it's only $1000).  While not everyone buys stock in lots, it's important if you do anything with (standardized) options on the stock because they are always acting on lots.  In addition, even if you don't buy round lots a higher price makes it harder to buy in for a specific amount because each unit share has a greater chance to be further away from your target amount. Conversely, shares that are priced too low will also find fewer buyers, because some holders have minimum price requirements due to low price (e.g. penny) stocks tending to be more speculative and volatile. So, different funds tracking the same index might pick different price points to satisfy demand that is not being filled by other funds selling at a different price point." Nanex just doesn't have the data. Some guy at CNBC, knowing that this stuff is great fodder for pageviews, *particularly* when there is a mysterious unnamed firm (its much too boring when there is an actual firm named, and the reason turns out to be something mundane like a slow market data feed), scooped it up and packaged it into a fear mongering story, and here we are. "I may be underestimating your knowledge of how exchanges work; if so, I apologize.  If not, then I believe the answer is relatively straightforward. Lets say price of a stock at time t1 is 15$ .  There are many types of price that an exchange reports to the public (as discussed below); let's say that you're referring to the most recent trade price.  That is, the last time a trade executed between a willing buyer and a willing seller was at $15.00. Lets say a significant buy order of 1M shares came in to the market. Here I believe might be a misunderstanding on your part.  I think you're assuming that the buy order must necessarily be requesting a price of $15.00 because that was the last published price at time t1.  In fact, orders can request any price they want.  It's totally okay for someone to request to buy at $10.00.  Presumably nobody will want to sell to him, but it's still a perfectly valid buy order. But let's continue under the assumptions that at t1: This makes the bid $14.99 and the ask $15.00.  (NYSE also publishes these prices.) There aren't enough people selling that stock. It's quite rare (in major US equities) for anyone to place a buy order that exceeds the total available shares listed for sale at all prices.  What I think you mean is that 1M is larger than the amount of currently-listed sell requests at the ask of $15.00. So say of the 1M only 100,000 had a matching sell order and others are waiting. So this means that there were exactly 100,000 shares waiting to be sold at the ask of $15.00, and that all other sellers currently in the market told NYSE they were only willing to sell for a price of $15.01 or higher.  If there had been more shares available at $15.00, then NYSE would have matched them. This would be a trigger to the automated system to start increasing the price. Here is another point of misunderstanding, I think.  NYSE's automated system does not invent a new, higher price to publish at this point.  Instead it simply reports the last trade price (still $15.00), and now that all of the willing sellers at $15.00 have been matched, NYSE also publishes the new ask price of $15.01.  It's not that NYSE has decided $15.01 is the new price for the stock; it's that $15.01 is now the lowest price at which anyone (known to NYSE) is willing to sell.  If nobody happened to be interested in selling at $15.01 at t1, but there were people interested in selling at $15.02, then the new published ask would be $15.02 instead of $15.01 -- not because NYSE decided it, but just because those happened to be the facts at the time. Similarly, the new bid is most likely now $15.00, assuming the person who placed the order for 1M shares did not cancel the remaining unmatched 900,000 shares of his/her order.  That is, $15.00 is now the highest price at which anyone (known to NYSE) is willing to buy. How much time does the automated system wait to increment the price, the frequency of the price change and by what percentage to increment etc. So I think the answer to all these questions is that the automated system does none of these things.  It merely publishes information about (a) the last trade price, (b) the price that is currently the lowest price at which anyone has expressed a willingness to sell, and (c) the price that is currently the highest price at which anyone has expressed a willingness to buy. ::edit:: Oh, I forgot to answer your primary question. Can we estimate the impact of a large buy order on the share price? Not only can we estimate the impact, but we can know it explicitly.  Because the exchange publishes information on all the orders it knows about, anyone tracking that information can deduce that (in this example) there were exactly 100,000 shares waiting to be purchased at $15.00.  So if a ""large buy order"" of 1M shares comes in at $15.00, then we know that all of the people waiting to sell at $15.00 will be matched, and the new lowest ask price will be $15.01 (or whatever was the next lowest sell price that the exchange had previously published)." you know, i'm curious.  why did you feel it was overpriced? if it opened at $50 a share and you thought that was too high, might you buy 2 shares if it opened at $25 instead? would there be any notable difference in what you owned? Your observation is mostly right, that 1 is a the number around which this varies.  You are actually referencing PEG, P/E to Growth ratio, which is a common benchmark to use to evaluate a stock. The article I link to provides more discussion. In addition to the GE move, Buffett's firm also added a large share of Synchrony, equalling about $520.7 in value, and a $418.1 million stake in Store Capital.   So, they bought one regular sized share? This is Why BI-journalists doesnt work in IB... I have a hard time giving them a P/E higher than 25 on the absolute top end. Given current numbers, that takes another ~60% off their share price putting them right around $10. Now... that's my top end estimate, I'd probably be willing to buy right around $8.  In order to support the IPO price, the models I've seen come in at projecting an average growth rate of 40% YoY for the next 5 years. If FB pulled that off, they'd be growing ~5X over the next 5 years (once compounded). As it stands, they've got 900B+ users. Doubling that would require a significant number of new people to start coming on line - 5x that would be impossible.  So... next option... They figure out how to monetize existing users/traffic better. It's possible - they don't do a very good job with this as it stands, but they've got a fine line to walk. They need to pull it off without driving users, or advertisers, away.  Suppose they were able to double their user base. They'd still need to do ~2.5x better per user to make the numbers. This doesn't take into account that the next billion users are significantly less valuable as an audience than the first billion. (Not in human terms, but in financial/marketing terms.)  I'm willing to give them a 20% growth rate for the next 5 years. That'd put them at a bit better than 2.5x over that time. It's still a stretch. That should put them in the same P/E range as GOOG (currently trading at a P/E of 17ish).  Any price higher than $10/share at this point is gambling on their ability to crack monetization. The higher you go, the higher you think the odds are.  One last thing I'd keep in mind. Most of the early employees with options are locked out of selling for the first 6 months after the IPO. There's a fairly large number of shares that will become available when that time is up. I'm curious to see how many of the early employees call in rich and go start new companies. (Think about what happened to paypal after being sold to ebay - yelp, youtube, and others all came out of the early employees.) I'd be watching the quarterly reports through the quarter ending 12/31. The numbers at that point will give a better gauge of a proper valuation. I absolutely wouldn't hold shares of FB during the period when employees first have their chance to cash their lottery tickets. What happened here is pretty obvious: You were trying to sell 2000 shares and apparently didn't mark your order to permit partial execution.  While they had a buyer at 94.66 they didn't want 2000 shares.  Thus your order went unfilled. I think the point is that m2 is 13.7 trillion usd, the Swiss investment is not even *half* a percent.  The us equities marker valuation is larger at 22.5 trillion USD. Dumping an extra 100 bil usd is too little to do anything. Even dumping a trillion USD  is a relatively small number. The difference is that Yahoo is showing the unadjusted price that the security traded for on that date, while google is adjusting for price splits. This means that Google is showing how much you would have had to pay to get what is now one share. Since 1979, JNJ has split 3-for-1 once, and 2-for-1 four times. 3x2x2x2x2 = 48. If you bought 1 share at that time, you would now have 48 shares today. Yahoo is showing a price of $66 for what was then 1 share. $66/48 = 1.375, which Google rounds to 1.38. You can see this if you get the prices from May 14-21, 1981. The stock split 3-for-1, and the price dropped from 108 to 36.38. Yahoo's adjusted close column has not been accurate since they re-wrote the Finance website. It now just represents the closing price. The other relevant field on Yahoo is the Adj. Close. This adjusts for splits, but also adjusts for dividends. Hence why this doesn't match either the Google or Yahoo numbers. The price of a shares reflects the expected future returns of that company. If it does not someone will notice and buy until it does. Look at this chart http://www.finanzen.net/chart/Arcandor (click on max), that's a former DAX company, so one of the largest german companys. Now it's bankrupt. Why do you think you are the only one who is going to notice? There are millions of people and even more computers, some a going to be smarter than you. Of course that does not happen to everyone but who knows. Is Volkswagen going to survive the current crisis? Probably. Is it coming back to former glory in the next half year? Who knows? Here comes the obvious solution: Don't buy single stocks, spread it out over many companies, some will shine, some will plument and you get the average. Oh that's an index, how convinent. Now if there were a way to save on all these transaction costs you're incurring...