Market
Also called: stock market
All the buyers and sellers of an asset together — nobody sets the price from above.
Not a place and not an authority. Just everyone buying and selling, mostly through apps, with no committee deciding what anything is worth.
A price is the last deal struck between a willing buyer and a willing seller. Nothing more official than that. When the news says the market “decided” something, it means a great many people traded and this is where the price landed.
The distinction worth keeping: the price tag flickers with the crowd’s mood; the engine underneath — the actual business — changes slowly, over years. A company does not become 4% worse at making things on a Tuesday afternoon, but its share price can move 4% by lunchtime.
Over days and weeks, prices mostly reflect mood. Over decades, they mostly reflect what the businesses actually earned. That gap is the entire reason patience is rewarded and watching daily is not.
It also explains why beating the market is hard. The price already reflects what a very large number of well-informed people collectively think. To profit from disagreeing, you have to be right where they are wrong — consistently.
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Covered properly in Learn.
This term appears in the glossary of The Quiet Fortune, Volume I.