CHAPTER 6Your first share trade

Once you have decided which shares to buy or sell and you are set up with your broker you are ready for your first trade.

What does the market look like?

When you are new to the sharemarket, one of the hardest things to understand is what the market actually looks like. Table 6.1 (overleaf) is an example of what you would typically see on a broker’s website. It is the ‘market depth’ for a share — that is, the number of buy orders and sell orders that people have placed into the market.

Table 6.1: the market depth for a share

This column shows how many shares people are looking to buy at that price. These two columns show you what people are willing to buy the shares for (the ‘bid’) and what they are ...

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