# How much money was traded on Wall Street today? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 26, 2011, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798 "2011-10-26T00:25:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![WarmNPrickly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d78d45/32.png) [@WarmNPrickly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WarmNPrickly)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 12:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/1 "2011-10-26T00:25:03Z")
I’ve seen the trading volume in terms of shares, but what is that in terms of dollars. It should be attainable from the number of shares times the average price of each share. Admittedly, I seem to be having trouble locating the trading volume in shares right now. I know I’ve seen it reported. ---
**Author:** ![WarmNPrickly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d78d45/32.png) [@WarmNPrickly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WarmNPrickly)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/2 "2011-10-26T02:04:37Z")
Ok, from [here](http://finance.yahoo.com/marketupdate?u) it looks as if volume on the NYSE was 4.480 billion shares and on the Nasdaq it was 1.840 billion shares. This doesn’t help that much though, since there may have been moreor less high value trades. I think the vast majority of stocks trade over $25 per share. ---
**Author:** ![WarmNPrickly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d78d45/32.png) [@WarmNPrickly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WarmNPrickly)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/3 "2011-10-26T13:32:40Z")
Are there really no investment wonks out there that can give a good estimate? I don’t expect a precise answer, but an approachable round figure would be great. Is the number in the trillions? Is it in the 100 billions? I think that it has to be that high just from multiplying the volume on individual stocks by there closing value. ---
**Author:** ![Smeghead](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/f1d935/32.png) [@Smeghead](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smeghead)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 1:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/4 "2011-10-26T13:35:32Z")
> [@WarmNPrickly](#): > > It should be attainable from the number of shares times the average price of each share. Only assuming there’s no correlation between volume of trading and price of the share, i.e. high-priced shares are traded at exactly the same rate as low-priced shares. ---
**Author:** ![Crotalus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crotalus/32/41_2.png) [@Crotalus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crotalus)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/5 "2011-10-26T13:38:27Z")
From [here](http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?mode=table&key=3162&category=3), it appears that the dollar volume on the NYSE averages around a trillion per month. ---
**Author:** ![Jas09](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d07c76/32.png) [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 2:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/6 "2011-10-26T14:30:00Z")
And [here](http://www.nyxdata.com/nysedata/asp/factbook/viewer_edition.asp?mode=table&key=3169&category=3)is the daily dollar volume for NYSE. Roughly $45-50 billion a day (which for a 20-day trading month would give you the $1 trillion figure **Crotalus** posted, which came from the same cite). There is other data there but the site is rather wonky. I’m still looking for corroboration of these numbers. ---
**Author:** ![Jas09](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d07c76/32.png) [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/7 "2011-10-26T14:31:30Z")
Here’s some confirmation: [http://www.knight.com/ourfirm/volumestats.asp](http://www.knight.com/ourfirm/volumestats.asp) Seems to show about $32 billion a day for September (down from $41 in August). ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/8 "2011-10-26T14:36:37Z")
> [@Smeghead](#): > > Only assuming there’s no correlation between volume of trading and price of the share, i.e. high-priced shares are traded at exactly the same rate as low-priced shares. This is a very important point. Before its reverse split, Citigroup accounted for an absurd amount of the share volume traded daily. However, the notational value traded wasn’t nearly as large as a percentage of the market. [Here](http://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=131&f=sh_avgvol_o2000&o=-averagevolume) is a list of stocks sorted by average daily volume. Export to Excel, mulitply average daily volume by price, add them up, and you should have your answer. ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 2:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/9 "2011-10-26T14:40:34Z")
> [@Jas09](#): > > Here’s some confirmation: [http://www.knight.com/ourfirm/volumestats.asp](http://www.knight.com/ourfirm/volumestats.asp) > > Seems to show about $32 billion a day for September (down from $41 in August). When looking at exchange, ECN, or broker-dealer volume statistics many times they are referring only to _their_ volume. In your link the $32b figure refers to shares traded by Knight. The link above to the NYSE data also is only referring to trades done on the NYSE, who doesn’t account for the majority of volume traded on NYSE listed stocks. ---
**Author:** ![Trom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/958977/32.png) [@Trom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trom)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/10 "2011-10-26T14:42:21Z")
Too late to edit… [Here](http://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=131&o=-averagevolume)is a more complete list of stocks sorted by avg. daily volume. Just looking at SPY (S&P 500 ETF), you have $39 billion per day. ---
**Author:** ![jbaker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/59ef9b/32.png) [@jbaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jbaker)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/11 "2011-10-26T19:13:48Z")
Are you looking for a number for any given day, or for an average? In 2010, the value of equity, bond, and ETF transactions processed by NSCC (which settles almost all broker-to-broker transactions in the United States) was $217.5 trillion (source: [DTCC's Businesses, Subsidiaries & Joint Ventures | DTCC](http://www.dtcc.com/about/business/statistics.php)). Assuming there were 252 business days in 2010, that works out to about $863 billion per day. The number would be considerably larger if you included transactions in government securities, which change hands much more frequently. ---
**Author:** ![Jas09](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/d07c76/32.png) [@Jas09](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jas09)\ **Post date:** [October 26, 2011, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/12 "2011-10-26T21:53:32Z")
Thanks for straightening that out, **Trom**. The numbers certainly _seemed_ low. ---
**Author:** ![WarmNPrickly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/d78d45/32.png) [@WarmNPrickly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WarmNPrickly)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2011, 1:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-much-money-was-traded-on-wall-street-today/600798/13 "2011-10-27T01:24:47Z")
Thanks guys. I think those are the numbers I was interested in.