Instrument Price Change

[FrancoisT]

Greetings All

I am curious as to how an instrument's price varies (oscillates) over time when (according to the platform) there has not been any volume traded on the instrument?

 

Insight will be greatly appreciated.

 

[neueneuen]

@FrancoisT, even if there are no trades happening, evolving market conditions make market participants modify the price they're willing to sell or buy a certain symbol at, i.e. they re-quote bid/ask.

Ultimately, when you're trading a centralized exchange-traded instrument (e.g. AAPL non-CFD stock) you can have access to both trades and bid-ask quotes, though not all platforms provide all three. When you're trading a non-centralized instrument (e.g. FOREX), by design trades are not reported to some central entity so you can only see bid-ask quotes and not trades as showing trades only from your broker's liquidity providers would not be representative of the whole market. Usually for FOREX, count of re-quotes is shown in place of volume as an indirect indicator of the volume.

When you're trading a CFD (like at IG), even if it's of a centralized exchange-traded instrument, showing trades makes little sense. Showing trades from the exchange would be factually wrong - the CFD highly correlates but does not equal to the underlying instrument on the exchange. Showing trades from the broker (e.g. IG) platform only would capture very small volume and would not be representative of the whole market.

Edited April 20 by neueneuen

[Boobiwoobi]

oh thank you, as a complete beginner it was interesting + useful!
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-change.asp can i read this site and take it as the truth?

Edited April 20 by Boobiwoobi
I forgot to ask

[neueneuen]

Yes, they're alright.