who does all that volume?

chibiks

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I have always wondered who buys and sells 300000 units of AMD everyday. The daily volume of most stocks is the same- cannot be buying and selling by individual traders. And institutionals are mostly investors not traders. So who and who transacts the daily volume seen everyday in most stocks? Is it algorithm activity?
 
Unfortunately, a very large % of daily volume comes from High Frequency Trading (HFT). You will see a great deal of this totally algo driven trading in the lower priced stocks because the the relatively high "leverage" because of the low price. It can be seen in shares like SIRI as well as AMD.

The algorithmic traders are just computer automated scalpers trying to capture pennies. There are entire firms that are dedicated HFT's.

They trade most stocks but tend to concentrate their business in low volatility, low priced stocks.

Rich
 
Thousands and thousands of mutual funds, throw on top of that pensions, insurance companies, hedge funds, speculators, HFT's, and then you have your mom+pops, and that's just here domestically. This can make for lots of volume on any given day.
 
I have always wondered who buys and sells 300000 units of AMD everyday. The daily volume of most stocks is the same- cannot be buying and selling by individual traders. And institutionals are mostly investors not traders. So who and who transacts the daily volume seen everyday in most stocks? Is it algorithm activity?

Those institutional traders who sold it in April 2012 and February-April 2011 are buying back. Why they are doing that? Possibly they are attracted by stock's low price and possibly their analysts are telling them that this stock's price is highly under-evaluated and worth putting money in.

High volume always reveals action of big money. Check the article below, it has nice explanation of actions behind abnormally high volume activity:
Overbought oversold
 
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