Replies to post #36097 on Cascadia Investments Inc (fka CDIV)

[mgland]

Its simple Joyful. Buying the ask supports the upward momentum. When momentum is lacking buying on the bid (placing order at bid price) is basicly fishing for shares. It takes the idea of "this is what I'm willing to pay" and letting it sit out there....someone may give them to you.
Supporting the bid means to keep the spread tight between the bid and the ask. Easy to do...if you have a stock with a big spread put your bid between them and they (mm) will move the bid up to reflect your order(most of the time unless they are hiding bids).
by tightening the spread in this fashion you make the stock more attractive to potential buyers and volume of trades.
Make sense?

[LoneGrey]

joyful I'm not the best to try and explain this and I really won't, I'll just make one comment and hopfully someelse of more knowlege can help you. But sitting the bid to me is when many buys are place at bid. This shows great demand for the stock at that price. This is when the bid starts getting stacked. This demand preceeds a price move up. Greater the demand the higher the price. So think of it this way; the MMs see all these shares wanting to be bought at bid and the shares wanting to be bought exceed the shares available to sell. So the MMs in theory can say OK I will sell the few shares I have to the highest bidder(s) and that can cause the people coming in to buy to start offering higher pps to get the shares and up goes the price. So when you look at L2 before placing your order to buy a stock, if L2 shows many MMs stacked at the bid you might think wow I will never get my shares at that price because there are so many orders in front of me so you may decide (in order to get the shares you want) to put in an order at a higher price hoping the MMs fill your order before any of the others. That is probably confusing and it is only one way to look at it, but I hope it helps some. Good Luck to you.