Asking price went through the roof
As folks have explained in the comments:
They can't keep rising with respect to people's income because eventually you run out of buyers. If there's roughly one house for every five people, then you'd better make sure that the price you set to sell your house is affordable to people in the upper fifth of income scales, or else you are mathematically guaranteed not to have any customers. Now, it's true that the price of particular houses can get much higher, but they tended to be higher in the first place. Housing isn't exactly an efficient market, but for the most part you have to pay for the house that you get, or else someone else will outbid you. An individual area might, temporarily, buck these trends because it suddenly becomes popular and there are a lot of extra buyers putting money on the table. In the long run, someone is going to build for those buyers, even if it means moving up the chain from enormous rural lots to suburban single-family homes to low-density garden apartments to residential towers. I wonder if it would be possible to become a demo house in a new market for this roof at a discounted rate, provided a person were to place a sign out front as is done with companies like ADT and the like. "Buyouts are usually for more than the ORIGINAL value of a stock. That's because the price ""premium"" represents an incentive for holders to ""tender"" their shares to the would-be buyer. Sometimes in these situations, the stock price rises above the proposed buyout price, in anticipation of a higher takeover bid from a SECOND party (that may or may not materialize). To answer the other part of the question, does a bidder have a chance of taking over a dying company for less than the market price? That is a strategy sometimes referred to as a ""take under,"" and it has not been a notably successful strategy. That's because it goes against ""human nature"" (of the seller). ""Where there is life, there is hope."" They would seldom accept a lower price for ""sure"" survival, when the market is telling them that they are worth a higher price. Very few people realize that the market may disappear tomorrow. Think of all the homeowners who won't cut their price, but insist on bids that meet recent ""comps."" And if the company is really dying, the prospective buyer may be best served by waiting until it does, and then pick up the individual pieces at auction." Remember that shares represent votes at the shareholders' meeting. If share price drops too far below the value of that percentage of the company, the company gets bought out and taken over. This tends to set a minimum share price derived from the company's current value. The share price may rise above that baseline if people expect it to be worth more in the future, or drop s bit below if people expect awful news. That's why investment is called speculation. If the price asked is too high to be justified by current guesses, nobody buys. That sets the upper limit at any given time. Since some of this is guesswork, the market is not completely rational. Prices can drop after good news if they'd been inflated by the expectation of better news, for example. In general, businesses which don't crash tend to grow.  Hence the market as a whole generally trends upward if viewed on a long timescale. But there's a lot of noise on that curve; short term or single stocks are much harder to predict. This happened to me recently.  What became the final offer was a cash buy-out of all of our shares rather than a conversion.  The cash buy-out was higher than the company's original asking price and than the stock ever went on the market before hand.  I was extremely pleased to have held on to the stock until the end. That said, it sounds like your situation is different.  You can't necessarily time this sort of thing.  You can just make your best decision and determine to be happy with the way it all plays out. "No, it can really not. Look at Detroit, which has lost a million residents over the past few decades. There is plenty of real estate which will not go for anything like it was sold. Other markets are very risky, like Florida, where speculators drive too much of the price for it to be stable. You have to be sure to buy on the downturn. A lot of price drops in real estate are masked because sellers just don't sell, so you don't really know how low the price is if you absolutely had to sell. In general, in most of America, anyway, you can expect Real Estate to keep up with inflation, but not do much better than that. It is the rental income or the leverage (if you buy with a mortgage) that makes most of the returns. In urban markets that are getting an influx of people and industry, however, Real Estate can indeed outpace inflation, but the number of markets that do this are rare. Also, if you look at it strictly as an investment (as opposed to the question of ""Is it worth it to own my own home?"") there are a lot of additional costs that you have to recoup, from property taxes to bills, rental headaches etc. It's an investment like any other, and should be approached with the same due diligence." Of course nobody would have believed me, that was the height of the bubble. Everybody was leveraged to hell thinking that housing prices would continue to rise, especially the people who bought houses they couldn't afford. Then when the bubble popped, there is this massive credit crunch and all of a sudden spending and investment dry up. Now there is near 0 interest rates and that still isn't enough to stimulate the economy, so inflation is very low and people are sitting on liquid assets because there is no sense in investing. 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. 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; "Often you are right, and the current information is ""priced in"", but I would say in times of market boom like this that the market can definitely overprice. Price is driven by trades/last trade. Someone may be willing to pay X, and do so, making the price now X, but that does not mean it is worth X. You could very well be paying a premium for it's perceived desirability. This is why investors/analysts spend time and energy on valuations, they want to compare the markets current price to what the price theoretically should/would be if it were purely driven by the data, in effect trying to remove sentiment from the equation to gain a more realistic idea of what a company is worth.  Side note adding on that, don't mistake this as saying one should pay a lot of attention to analysts or their price targets, though analysts do have insightful things to say." It's a race to the bottom. Use raising debt ceiling will mean moe helicopter money. Euro is also buying bonds. Uk is idiots having no clue what they're doing so it's also going down. You just have to spread risk to fight inflation and avoid a crash if it happens The largest problem and source of anxiety / ruin for homeowners during the housing market collapse was caused by the inability to refinance. Many people had bought homes which they were stretched to afford, by using variable-rate mortgages.  These would typically offer a very attractive initial rate, with an annual cap on the potential increase of rate.  Many of these people intended to refinance their variable-rate to a fixed rate once terms were more favorable.  If their house won't appraise for the value needed to obtain a new loan, they are stuck in their current contract with potentially unfavorable rates in the later years (9.9% above prime was not unheard of.) Also, many people, especially those in areas of high inflation in the housing market, used a financial device known as a Balloon Mortgage, which essentially forced you to get a new loan after some number of years (2, 5, 10) when the entire note became due.  Some of those loans offered payments less than Principal + Interest! So, say you move near Los Angeles and can't afford the $1.2M for the 3-bedroom ranch in which you wish to live.  You might work out a deal with your mortgage broker/banker in which you agree contractually to only pay $500/month, with a balloon payment of $1.4M due in 5 years, which seemed like a good deal since you (and everyone else,) actually expect the house to be 'worth' $1.5M in 5 years. This type of thing was done all the time back in the day.  Now, imagine the housing bubble bursts and your $1.2M home is suddenly only valued at, perhaps, $750k.  You still owe $1.4M sometime in the next several years (maybe very soon, depending on timing,) and can only get approved financing for the current $750k value -- so you're basically anticipating becoming homeless and bankrupt within the same year. That is a source of much anxiety about being upside-down on a loan. See this question for an unfortunate example. A bank selling a foreclosed property would negotiate a lower cash deal, I doubt it would be that extreme, 130 vs 100.  An individual seller may give up $10K to save time and get his next home closed as well, but again, I suspect it would be rare to find that large a delta. "I've alway thought that it was strange, but the ""price"" that gets quoted on a stock exchange is just the price of the last transaction. The irony of this definition of price is that there may not actually be any more shares available on the market at that price. It's also strange to me that the price isn't adjusted at all for the size of the transaction. A transaction of just 1 share will post a new price even if just seconds earlier 100,000 shares traded for a different price. (Ok, unrealistic example, but you get my point.) I've always believed this is an odd way to describe the price. Anyway, my diatribe here is supposed to illustrate the point that the fluctuations you see in price don't really reflect changing valuations by the stock-owning public. Each post in the exchange maintains a book of orders, with unmatched buy orders on one side and unmatched sell orders on the other side. If you go to your broker and tell him, ""fill my order for 50,000 shares at market price"", then the broker won't fill you 50,000 shares at .20. Instead, he'll buy the 50 @ .22, then 80 @ .23, then 100 @ .30, etc. Because your order is so large compared to the unmatched orders, your market order will get matched a bunch of the unmatched orders on the sell side, and each match will notch the posted price up a bit. If instead you asked the broker, ""open a limit order to buy 50000 shares at .20"", then the exchange will add your order to the book: In this case, your order likely won't get filled at all, since nobody at the moment wants to sell at .20 and historically speaking it's unlikely that such a seller will suddenly appear. Filling large orders is actually a common problem for institutional investors: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_16/b3929113_mz020.htm http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mkearns/papers/vwap.pdf (Written by a professor I had in school!)" I can't say I know everything about the underlying details, but from what I understand, your limit buy adds to the bid side of open orders, and one possibility is that someone placed a market order to sell when the bid price for the stock fell to $10 which was matched to your open limit order. So using your terminology, I would say the spot bid price is what fell to $10, even if for a brief moment. Whether or not it is possible for your order to be filled when the limit buy price is deeper than the current bid price is beyond me. It may have something to do with lot sizes.