Buy/Sell Distinction?

[Dennis Ng]

Someone asked this at another forum:
Buy/sell distinction?

In a stock's trade summary, transactions are divided into buy up and sell down.

Why the buy/sell distinction? Surely in every completed transaction there must always be both a buyer and a seller.

My comments:
a stock always has 2 price, one is the "bid" (buyer's price) another is the "offer" (seller's price). For instance, stock ABC shows $1 and $1.05. If a buyer wants to buy immeidately, he has to buy at the seller's price $1.05. Thus, when he buy at seller's price, it's deemed a "buy up".

Conversely, when a seller wants to sell his stock immediately, he has to sell at the buyer's price of $1. Thus, when seller sells at buyer's price, it's deemed a "sell down".

From above, you can see the stock has strong support of buyers if most of the transactions are done on "buy up" compared to "sell down". Sentiment of the stock is deemed negative if most of the transactions are done on a "sell down" basis.

Hope the above clarifies.