[chollida1]

Of course you can buy at the closing price. There are MOC and LOC orders for doing just that (Market On Close and Limit On Close).

The former indicates that you must get your order filled at the closing price, the latter allows you to specify a limit at which you'll go to, in order to trade at the closing price.

How else would funds that need to trade at the closing price, actually trade at the closing price?

Now you may not like the closing price, but that's another story.

> The closing price is the just the price that marked the last trade of the day, and isn't otherwise special.

I guess i should also point out that many ETF's mark their value based on the closing prices of the NYSE or Nasdaq making their closing prices very important.

[readams]

Those are still just ordinary trades that happen at the end of the day. You're still just pulling orders off of the queue of sell orders if you're buying. The final close price will of course be the price after these trades are executed, and you aren't guaranteed to even get the close price.

[chollida1]

> Those are still just ordinary trades that happen at the end of the day. You're still just pulling orders off of the queue of sell orders if you're buying. The final close price will of course be the price after these trades are executed, and you aren't guaranteed to even get the close price.

I'm pretty sure at this point I'm being trolled but just in case you are being serious and don't know how to google......

https://www.nyse.com/markets/nyse-arca/auctions

[readams]

Are you disputing that if you issue such a trade that you are not guaranteed to be able to execute it? Because, I assure you, there is no such guarantee. I'm not even sure why this requires some special explanation. There have to be enough people willing to trade at that price. The exchange isn't going to force people to trade with you.

[chollida1]

hold on, let me have some time to adjust for all the goal post moves you've done here.

> No you can't. You can only buy a stock based on the set of offers to sell that stock

First you said that you can't buy/sell at the closing price and I showed you that this is wrong. Infact there are a whole lot of people who are obligated to trade at the closing price

Then you said the closing price wasn't special. This as well was shown to be false as many ETF's are marked by the closing prices of certain markets, notably the NYSE.

Then you said you aren't guaranteed to get the closing price. This was an even stranger error as the message before I showed you the MOC order which indicates that you will trade at the closing price.

Finally you tripled down on this mistake by changing your argument that technically there might not be any trading partner at the close.

This is technically true that in theory it might happen, but in practice I'll sit and wait for you to find me a case where this happened.

I mean think about it. You put out an MOC order that indicates you need to get a buy order filled. Unless you are trying to buy some crazy amount of shares, you will get filled. depending on the price the closing price can move up to 10% or 20%. This means that an arbitrager can pick up shares on the cheap or sell them for an artificially high price.

The system just works.

I get that you don't work in finance but you continue to keep making the same false statements over and over again:(

[stouset]

You're being intentionally obtuse, for what, internet points?

> kgwgk: But you can trade at the closing price, which is the one used by S&P to do their numbers, can't you?

> readams: No you can't. You can only buy a stock based on the set of offers to sell that stock

readams is unequivocally correct here. You can attempt to trade at the closing price, but doing so is entirely at the mercy of whether or not enough open offers exist to sell that stock.

> chollida1: Then you said the closing price wasn't special. This as well was shown to be false as many ETF's are marked by the closing prices of certain markets, notably the NYSE.

This point by readams is also true. The closing price of a stock isn't special — it's, as (s)he said, simply the price of the last trade of the day. The fact that some ETFs are marked by the price of market close makes their trading price "special", but that doesn't imply anything particular about the closing price of the asset(s) they're based on.

> chollida1: Then you said you aren't guaranteed to get the closing price. This was an even stranger error as the message before I showed you the MOC order which indicates that you will trade at the closing price.

Again, readams is correct. You're guaranteed to get the closing price if and only if there are open orders at that price. Which is a big if and only if, and not actually a guarantee.

> chollida1: Finally you tripled down on this mistake by changing your argument that technically there might not be any trading partner at the close. This is technically true that in theory it might happen, but in practice I'll sit and wait for you to find me a case where this happened.

Consider the context of this entire conversation: index funds that manage billions in assets. If you don't think they can utterly exhaust open buy/sell orders at market close for any trade they need to execute to track their index, you've lost your mind. This whole thread was about how these funds have to strategically place their orders to track the underlying index as faithfully as possible, without losing their shirts to vultures who know that large funds have to execute certain orders to stay on track.

[toast0]

> This point by readams is also true. The closing price of a stock isn't special — it's, as (s)he said, simply the price of the last trade of the day. The fact that some ETFs are marked by the price of market close makes their trading price "special", but that doesn't imply anything particular about the closing price of the asset(s) they're based on

The closing price is special -- there's a special procedure to set the price and determine which orders execute (quite similar to the opening procedure), NYSE has a closing auction, NASDAQ has a closing cross, I'm sure most other exchanges have similar.

If there's no market/limit on close orders for a given stock, then the closing price would be the last trade; presumably the same for a stock which had its trading halted earlier in the day.

[anonymousDan]

But what if there aren't enough people willing to sell at the closing price to get all the shares you need?

[infinite8s]

Then you don't get all the shares you need. It's a marketplace like any other with slightly more complicated rules. Nothing magical about it.

[anonymousDan]

Right, that was kind of my point as the parent seemed to be implying you could perform an arbitrary amount of trades at the closing price and would be somehow magically guaranteed to fill the orders. Or at least that's how I read it. Interesting discussion nonetheless.