What does it mean when someone says “FTSE closed at xxx today”
FTSE is an index catering to the London stock exchange. It is a  Capitalization-Weighted Index  of 100 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange with the highest market capitalization . When somebody says FTSE closed at 6440, it basically means at the end of the day, the index calculated using the day end market capitalization of the companies, included in the index, is 6440. It's sort of the sum of stock prices, but bigger companies are weighed more heavily.
It does sometimes open one day the same as it closed the previous day.  Take a look at ESCA, it closed October 29th at 4.50, at opened November 1st at 4.50.  It's more likely to change prices overnight than it is between two successive ticks during the day, because a lot more time passes, in which news can come out, and in which people can reevaluate the stock. You say: Every time it seems the share price dips. Does it?  Have you collected the data?   It may just be that you are remembering the events that seem most painful at the time. To move the market with your trade you need to be dealing in a large amount of shares.    Unless the stock is illiquid (e.g most VCT in the UK), I don’t think you are dealing in that large a number; if you were then you would likely have access to a real time feed of the order book and could see what was going on. "Some technical indicators (e.g. Williams %R) indicate whether the market is overbought or oversold.   ... Every time a stock or commodity is bought, it is also sold. And vice versa. So how can anything ever be over-bought or over-sold? But I'm sure I'm missing something. What is it? You're thinking of this as a normal purchase, but that's not really how equity markets operate. First, just because there are shares of stock purchased, it doesn't mean that there was real investor buyer and seller demand for that instrument (at that point in time).  Markets have dedicated middlemen called Market Makers, who are responsible to make sure that there is always someone to buy or sell; this ensures that all instruments have sufficient liquidity.  Market Makers may decide to lower their bid on a stock based on a high number of sellers, or raise their ask for a high number of buyers. During an investor rush to buy or sell an instrument (perhaps in response to a news release), it's possible for Market Makers to accumulate a large number of shares, without end-investors being involved on both sides of the transaction.  This is one example of how instruments can be over-bought or over-sold. Since Williams %R creates over-bought and over-sold signals based on historical averages of open / close prices, perhaps it's better to think of these terms as ""over-valued"" and ""under-valued"".  Of course, there could be good reason for instruments to open or close outside their expected ranges, so Williams %R is just a tool to give you clues... not a real evaluation of the instrument's true value." The interpretation is correct. The Reuters may give you the London 4PM rates if you query after the close for the day. The close rate is treated as the rate.  http://uk.reuters.com/business/currencies/quote?srcAmt=1&srcCurr=GBP&destAmt=&destCurr=USD The London 4PM rate may be obtained from Bank of England at the link below; http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/mfsd/iadb/index.asp?Travel=NIxSTxTIx&levels=1&XNotes=Y&XNotes2=Y&Nodes=X3790X3791X3873X33940&SectionRequired=I&HideNums=-1&ExtraInfo=false&A3836XBMX3790X3791.x=4&A3836XBMX3790X3791.y=3 Or any other Bank that provides such data A stock is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If it trades different values on different days, that means someone was willing to pay a higher price OR someone was willing to sell at a lower price.  There is no rule to prevent a stock from trading at $10 and then $100 the very next trade... or $1 the very next trade. (Though exchanges or regulators may halt trading, cancel trades, or impose limits on large price movements as they deem necessary, but this is beside the point I'm trying to illustrate). Asking what happens from the close of one day to the open of the next is like asking what happens from one trade to the next trade... someone simply decided to sell or pay a different price.  Nothing needs to have happened in between. Graphs are nothing but a representation of data. Every time a trade is made, a point is plotted on the graph. After points are plotted, they are joined in order to represent the data in a graphical format.  Think about it this way.  1.) Walmart shuts at 12 AM. 2.)Walmart is selling almonds at $10 a pound.  3.) Walmart says that the price is going to reduce to $9 effective tomorrow. 4.) You are inside the store buying almonds at 11:59 PM.  5.) Till you make your way up to the counter, it is already 12:01 AM, so the store is technically shut. 6.) However, they allow you to purchase the almonds since you were already in there.  7.) You purchase the almonds at $9 since the day has changed. 8.) So you have made a trade and it will reflect as a point on the graph. 9.) When those points are joined, the curves on the graph will be created. 10.) The data source is Walmart's system as it reflects the sale to you. ( In your case the NYSE exchange records this trade made). Buying a stock is just like buying almonds. There has to be a buyer. There has to be a seller. There has to be a price to which both agree. As soon as all these conditions are met, and the trade is made, it is reflected on the graph. The only difference between the graphs from 9 AM-4 PM, and 4 PM-9 AM is the time. The trade has happened regardless and NYSE(Or any other stock exchange) has recorded it! The graph is just made from that data. Cheers. "The first thing that it is important to note here is that the examples you have given are not individual bond prices.  This is what is called the ""generic"" bond price data, in effect a idealised bond with the indicated maturity period.  You can see individual bond prices on the UK Debt Management Office website. The meaning of the various attributes (price, yield, coupon) remains the same, but there may be no such bond to trade in the market.  So let's take the example of an actual UK Gilt, say the ""4.25% Treasury Gilt 2019"".  The UK Debt Management Office currently lists this bond as having a maturity date of 07-Mar-2019 and a price of GBP 116.27.  This means that you will pay 116.27 to purchase a bond with a nominal value of GBP 100.00.  Here, the ""nominal price"" is the price that HM Treasury will buy the bond back on the maturity date.   Note that the title of the bond indicates a ""nominal"" yield of 4.25%.  This is called the coupon, so here the coupon is 4.25%.  In other words, the treasury will pay GBP 4.25 annually for each bond with a nominal value of GBP 100.00.  Since you will now be paying a price of GBP 116.27 to purchase this bond in the market today, this means that you will be paying 116.27 to earn the nominal annual interest of 4.25.  This equates to a 3.656% yield, where 3.656% = 4.25/116.27.   It is very important to understand that the yield is not the whole story.  In particular, since the bond has a nominal value of GBP100, this means that as the maturity date approaches the market price of the bond will approach the nominal price of 100. In this case, this means that you will witness a loss of capital over the period that you hold the bond.  If you hold the bond until maturity, then you will lose GBP 16.27 for each nominal GBP100 bond you hold.  When this capital loss is netted off the interest recieved, you get what is called the gross redemption yield.  In this case, the gross redemption yield is given as approximately 0.75% per annum. NB.  The data table you have included clearly has errors in the pricing of the 3 month, 6 month, and 12 month generics." "I'm not sure the term actually has a clear meaning. We can think of ""what does this mean"" in two ways: its broad semantic/metaphorical meaning, and its mechanical ""what actual variables in the market represent this quantity"". Net buying/selling have a clear meaning in the former sense by analogy to the basic concept of supply and demand in equilibrium markets. It's not as clear what their meaning should be in the latter sense. Roughly, as the top comment notes, you could say that a price decrease is because of net selling at the previous price level, while a price rise is driven by net buying at the previous price level. But in terms of actual market mechanics, the only way prices move is by matching of a buyer and a seller, so every market transaction inherently represents an instantaneous balance across the bid/ask spread. So then we could think about the notion of orders. Actual transactions only occur in balance, but there is a whole book of standing orders at various prices. So maybe we could use some measure of the volume at various price levels in each of the bid/ask books to decide some notion of net buying/selling. But again, actual transactions occur only when matched across the spread. If a significant order volume is added on one side or the other, but at a price far away from the bid/offer - far enough that an actual trade at that price is unlikely to occur - should that be included in the notion of net buying/selling? Presumably there is some price distance from the bid/offer where the orders don't matter for net buying/selling. I'm sure you'd find a lot of buyers for BRK.A at $1, but that's completely irrelevant to the notion of net buying/selling in BRK.A. Maybe the closest thing I can think of in terms of actual market mechanics is the comparative total volumes during the period that would still have been executed if forced to execute at the end of period price. Assuming that traders' valuations are fixed through the period in question, and trading occurs on the basis of fundamentals (which I know isn't a good assumption in practice, but the impact of price history upon future price is too complex for this analysis), we have two cases. If price falls, we can assume all buyers who executed above the last price in the period would have happily bought at the last price (saving money), while all sellers who executed below the last price in the period would also be happy to sell for more. The former will be larger than the latter. If the price rises, the reverse is true." Technically, of course. Almost any company can go bankrupt. One small note: a company goes bankrupt, not its stock. Its stock may become worthless in bankruptcy, but a stock disappearing or being delisted doesn't necessarily mean the company went bankrupt. Bankruptcy has implications for a company's debt as well, so it applies to more than just its stock. I don't know of any historical instances where this has happened, but presumably, the warning signs of bankruptcy would be evident enough that a few things could happen.  Another company, e.g. another exchange, holding firm, etc. could buy out the exchange that's facing financial difficulty, and the companies traded on it would transfer to the new company that's formed. If another exchange bought out the struggling exchange, the shares of the latter could transfer to the former. This is an attractive option because exchanges possess a great deal of infrastructure already in place. Depending on the country, this could face regulatory scrutiny however. Other firms or governments could bail out the exchange if no one presented a buyout offer. The likelihood of this occurring depends on several factors, e.g. political will, the government(s) in question, etc. For a smaller exchange, the exchange could close all open positions at a set price. This is exactly what happened with the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange (HKMex) that MSalters mentioned. When the exchange collapsed in May 2013, it closed all open positions for their price on the Thursday before the shutdown date. I don't know if a stock exchange would simply close all open positions at a set price, since equity technically exists in perpetuity regardless of the shutdown of an exchange, while many derivatives have an expiration date. Furthermore, this might not be a feasible option for a large exchange. For example, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange lists thousands of products and manages hundreds of millions of transactions, so closing all open positions could be a significant undertaking.  If none of the above options were available, I presume companies listed on the exchange would actively move to other, more financially stable exchanges. These companies wouldn't simply go bankrupt. Contracts can always be listed on other exchanges as well. Considering the high level of mergers and acquisitions, both unsuccessful and successful,  in the market for exchanges in recent years, I would assume that option 1 would be the most likely (see the NYSE Euronext/Deutsche Börse merger talks and the NYSE Euronext/ICE merger that's currently in progress), but for smaller exchanges, there is the recent historical precedent of the HKMex that speaks to #3. Also, the above answer really only applies to publicly traded stock exchanges, and not all stock exchanges are publicly-held entities. For example, the Shanghai Stock Exchange is a quasi-governmental organization, so I presume option 2 would apply because it already receives government backing. Its bankruptcy would mean something occurred for the government to withdraw its backing or that it became public, and a discussion of those events occurring in the future is pure speculation. "he is saying that ""QE"" meaning ""quantitative easing"" meaning ""the theory that the government flooded the markets with money, artificially driving up the price of stocks"" meant that hedge funds, which HEDGE, and benefit from an up-and-down market, couldn't win in a market where it just kept going up.  It's basically a conspiracy theory bears have been pushing for years ""QE artificially inflated the market, it's gonna crash!""" "During the day, market and limit orders are submitted at any time by market participants and there is a bid and an ask that move around over time.  Trades occur whenever a market order is submitted or a limit order is submitted that at a price that matches or exceeds an existing limit order.  If you submit a market order, it may consume all best-price limit orders and you can get multiple prices, changing the bid or ask at the same time.  All that stuff happens during the trading day only. What happens at the end of the day is different.  A bunch of orders that were submitted during the day but marked as ""on close"" are aggregated with any outstanding limit orders to create a single closing price according to the algorithm established by the exchange.  Each exchange may handle the details of this closing event differently.  For example, the Nasdaq's closing cross or the NYSE's closing auction. The close is the most liquid time of the day, so investors who are trading large amounts and not interested in intraday swings will often submit a market-on-close or limit-on-close order.  This minimizes their chance of affecting the price or crossing a big spread.  It's actually most relevant for smaller stocks, which may have too little volume during the day to make big trades, but have plenty at the close.  In short, the volume you see is due to these on-close orders. The spike in volume most likely has no special information about what will happen overnight or the next day.  It's probably just a normal part of the market for illiquid stocks." Trading volumes are higher at the end of the day as many traders close their open positions. In the morning however, traders incorporate various factors like performance of worldwide markets overnight, any corporate or government announcements, global macro events, etc. Some platforms/brokers have HTB indication for a stock symbol, meaning Hard To Borrow. That usually means you can't sell it short at the moment. "Institutions and market makers tend to try and stay delta neutral, meaning that for every options contract they buy or write, they buy or sell the equivalent underlying asset. This, as a theory, is called max pain, which is more of an observation of this behavior by retail investors. This as a reality is called delta hedging done by market makers and institutional investors. The phenomenom is that many times a stock gets pinned to a very even number at a particular price on options expiration days (like 500.01 or 499.99 by closing bell). At options expiration dates, many options contracts are being closed (instutitions and market makers are typically on the other side of those trades, to keep liquidity), so for every one standard 100 share contract the market maker wrote, they bought 100 shares of the underlying asset, to remain delta neutral. When the contract closes (or get rid of the option) they sell that 100 shares of the underlying asset. At mass volume of options traded, this would cause noticeable downward pressure, similarly for other trades it would cause upward pressure as institutions close their short positions against options they had bought. The result is a pinned stock right above or below an expiration that previously had a lot of open interest. This tends to happen in more liquid stocks, than less liquid ones, to answer that question. As they have more options series and more strike prices. No, this would not be illegal, in the US attempting to ""mark the close"" is supposedly prohibited but this wouldn't count as it, the effect of derivatives on stock prices is far beyond the SEC's current enforcement regime :) although an active area of research" There are banks and credit unions that don't charge fee for incoming wire transfer. You most likely won't get that from big brick and mortar banks like BofA, Citi but if you are doing it regularly, using another bank that offers it free would save you a lot. Since ACH are free, you can transfer money between those banks to your regular bank (e.g. BofA) for free. There would be delay involved in this process due to additional ACH. You could also use one these banks as your primary bank to avoid that delay. Credit unions are also generally fee friendly and many would offer free incoming wire transfer. However you are limited to what is available to you as all of them would have some membership criteria.