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Why Do Stock Prices Move?

The Stock Market for Beginners • Beginner Investing • 6 min

At the most basic mechanical level, a stock's price moves for one reason: the balance between buy orders and sell orders shifts. More people wanting to buy than sell at the current price pushes the price up until it finds a new balance; more people wanting to sell than buy pushes it down. The real question worth understanding is what causes that balance to shift in the first place — and it's rarely just one…

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