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Scale In and Scale Out

Categories: Trading

You're a big institutional investor (big by assets under management, not by size). You scaled into your long position in MSFT by buying 22 million shares (big-time "scale"). You rode it from $38 to $150. And now you think they're done growing for a while, so you want to scale out. That is, it takes you days of smallish selling...a million a day maybe, at most, so that you don't move the market prices on your way out to quietly take your profits, pay taxes, and move on.

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Finance: What does it mean to "scale"?60 Views

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Finance allah shmoop What does it mean to scale Well

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here's a squid eyeball from space fifty miles away and

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here's a squid eyeball from our boat the pesca squid

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alia's from a mile away and here's a squid eyeball

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from the view of our iphone we just dropped in

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the water when the squids when right beneath the boat

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scaring the crap out of us literally at one scale

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we could barely see the ocean At another scale We

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saw way too much eye ball scale and business has

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the same kind of dramatic effect as operations come into

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play That is it's One thing to serve lemonade drinks

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to one hundred people a week It takes one stand

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a permit grocery store visits worth of supplies it's completely

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Another thing Toe serve a million drinks a week for

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the latter You need infrastructure trucks storage and armies of

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servers to you know serve Yeah that's what they do

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someone's gotta get lemonades to the people So when a

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company scales it means that they have gone from a

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modest few million dollars of sales to sales of maybe

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one hundred million and then a billion Some like that

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The skill set for the former is a vastly different

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set than for the ladder and some people are able

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to do both Howard schultz founder and ceo of starbucks

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We're looking at you well starbucks started off is just

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one store in seattle in like five minutes later there

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were a gazillion of them all over the world thinking

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of coffee in any language So yeah that's How a

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company scales from you little toe Big big Incidentally you'll

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want to stay off the scale if you consume venti

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caramel frappe with whip on a daily basis but on 00:01:44.897 --> [endTime] there so good

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