One of things that still baffles me about the stock market is the vast sum of money that exchanges hands (electronically of course) at such a blistering pace.
In the blink of an eye, a few million dollar orders can be quietly executed in any given stock and no one pays it any attention. It’s the way it’s always been, so it’s simply standard operating procedure. No big deal.
So yesterday, as I was watching the price action in Baidu.com (known as the Chinese version of Google) react to the news that Google might be pulling out of China for good, I began wondering how much money could actually be exchanged between buyers and sellers of Baidu’s stock in just 60 seconds. The fact that Baidu was trading at $450 per share also aroused my curiosity because it’s not like the Everyday Joe can plop $45,000 for 100 shares on a whim.
So just for fun, I pulled the data stream. Here’s what I found…
In just 60 seconds, a little over 20 Million U.S. Dollars had exchanged hands through the digital ether.
The wealth transfer becomes even more mind boggling when you begin to scale up those numbers from an individual stock and begin to think just how much money changes hands on the major stock exchanges, like the NYSE or NASDAQ, where thousands of stocks are listed and routinely trade several million shares every day.
So is it just me that gets the doe-eyed rookie look, or does this happen to you too?