Underneath the stock prices that you can look up on any stock quoting site, there's a dynamic process of bids and asks. A bid is the amount someone is willing to pay for a stock. The ask is the amount the seller is willing to accept.
Regular folks just go to their Ameritrade accounts and pay the market price for the stock at any given time. Wall Street players get into the weeds with the bid/ask, trying to get the best possible price (when you're dealing with millions of dollars, those fractions of a cent per share start to add up).
The phrase "bidding up" has a couple connotations. In its more general sense, it just means something like "sending the stock higher," as in "investors are really bidding up shares of Apple today."
On a more technical level, the phrase can refer to a strategy for acquiring shares at a time when a stock is rising quickly. Basically, if you try to get too cute with your bid when a stock is skyrocketing, you could end up under-bidding the market and not getting any stock at all.
Bidding up means that you take the fact that the stock is rising into account when you place your bid, over-bidding to make sure you find a matching ask. Of course, this process helps fuel the upward rise in the stock, which can last until people finally start saying to themselves, "This is stupid. I'm just going to go buy bonds instead for a while."
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![Finance: What is a hot issue?](https://media1.shmoop.com/video/thumbnails/COURSE.FINANCE.835_770x433.jpg)
Finance: What is a hot issue?2 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is ah hot issue All right
Well it's one that has demanded more than it is
supplied One that is loved more than it is hated
One that is hot more thin it's gold Well the
most common hot issue in the press You read about
all the time Yeah It's an aipo that everybody wants
Why Well it's basically free money to the investors Price
talk has been ten to twelve dollars a share And
well then it looks like it's moved twelve to fifteen
and out price doc's fifteen to eighteen a share And
traders are mumbling that the first actual traded print will
be something like forty dollars a share So anyone who
buys at that eighteen dollars price or really any price
upto thirty thirty two thirty five something like that Well
they'll make a massive return for one day's work just
flipping their stock Tio you no longer term holders I
think about the real estate show where they flip houses
you know Well they have to do a whole lot
of work to flip a house on stocks are a
lot easier Well why do hot issues even happen Well
often banks purposely underprice i pose to quote pay the
street unquote for taking risk and buying that aipo handsomely
like they price it low Lots of people are going
to buy it have a low cost basis and remember
it fondly Well cos generally play along instead of selling
say thirty forty fifty percent of themselves to the public
in there i po well they only sell ten percent
and later on they'll sell more when the stock is
popped and traded and settled and has a buying public
and all the other good things that go with it
so and only a tiny amount of shares out there
trading even modest demand can drive prices to the sky
and this phenomenon happens Ah lot ebay snap facebook A
whole bunch of others essentially created hot issues by offering
very tiny fractions of ownership of themselves to the public
in there i po so that the enormous buyer interest
almost guarantees more demand than supply of the security being
sold and hot issues as you guess our great well 00:02:03.51 --> [endTime] until they're not
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