RE: Looking for a good introduction/guide to trading - any recommendations please?5 Mar 2021 09:15
MM is a market maker. They enable trades to happen. Where a share has less volume (here for instance) the spread (which is the difference between the buy and sell price) can be rather large. You can seen around 30% on some AIM minnows with rare trades.
This is important as, if you're a trader you need to factor in the spread to your portfolio (it will show as down by XX% as soon as you buy due to the selling price being that much lower). In the main market, with their much higher market cap companies (market capitalisation is total outstanding shares x share price), huge trade volume, and many multiple MMs supporting the trading, the spread is much lower. By way of example, Lloyds' spread is currently 0.07%.
Back to large spreads; these are set by the market makers and sometimes annoy us as they are false (if you try and sell your shares they could be higher than the sell price reported by the spread and vice versa with buy), many believe this is a tactic by the MMs to either attract buying/reduce selling or again vice versa. It's worth noting that, as you probably know, the reported price on LSE is 15mins behind - so sometimes it's that that cause the confusion too (as it may have dropped/increased during the intervening period).
Best,
Lewis