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To: Ilaine who wrote (28427)	10/15/2000 4:37:04 PM
From: UnBelievable	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

The Money Is Never There Unlike banks, which must maintain a certain percentage of their deposits, there really is no collateral for stock (except the market value of the tangible assets of the company.) On any given day, a companies market capitalization would be decimated if even a small percent of the shareholders actually want the "capital value" of the stock. Saying the market went up $152 billion just means that if every share available could have traded at the price of the last share traded on Friday it would result in a value $152 billion more than if every share had traded at the price of the last price to trade on Wednesday. Just to beat a dead horse <gg> Let's say that there were 100 prints of an artists lithograph. The prints had been selling at $100. The market value of the prints would be said to be $10,000. Somebody goes to a party at a friends house who has the lithograph and decides she really wants it. She asks her friend if she can buy it from her. The friend says sure and ask for $1,000, and the person wanting the print pays that amount. This does not really mean that the value of the 100 prints is now $100,000. In fact when the other owners of the print hear about how much they print sold for a number of them decided to try to sell their copies on EBAY. The best bid any of them received was $50. <gg> What the negative money flow shows is that there were a number of dealers who engaged is somewhat suspect sales of the stock at increased prices. They then used these increased prices as the basis for negotiating the sale price of other shares, which wound up being sold at a discount to the artificially high price, but considerably higher than would have been the case if the previous closing prices had been the basis for the sale. This is one of the problems when the price of a stock is based exclusively on the perception of what someone in the future will be willing to pay for it.