Markets

A market is just a matching system: people who want to buy something and people who want to sell it, meeting on price. When you place an order, you're not trading with "the market" as some abstract force — you're trading with another person or firm on the other side, right now.

Prices move because that balance shifts. New information — a company's earnings, a central bank's rate decision, an export policy — changes what buyers are willing to pay or what sellers are willing to accept, and the price adjusts to find a new balance.

Liquidity is how easily you can buy or sell without moving the price much yourself. A stock that trades constantly in huge volume barely notices your order; a thin, rarely-traded one can jump on a single trade. It's worth knowing which kind of market you're in before you assume the price you see is the price you'll get.

A lot of what looks like chaos in daily price moves is just this matching process reacting to new information in real time — which is exactly why single-day swings are usually noise, and the trend over months matters more than the trend over hours.