Term: Bid

A bid is the price at which someone is willing to buy a stock (or any other tradable asset) right now. If you want to sell immediately, the bid is the price you'd get.

Every stock has two live prices on the order book: the bid and the ask (also called the offer). The bid is the highest price a buyer currently has standing in the market; the ask is the lowest price a seller will accept. These two numbers are almost never the same, and the gap between them is called the spread. When you look at a trading platform and see something like "148.20 x 148.25," the first number is the bid and the second is the ask.

The nuance that trips people up is direction: a bid is not what you pay when buying, it's what you'd receive when selling. Beginners often confuse bid and ask because both sound like "the price of the stock." In reality the stock doesn't have one price at any instant — it has a buyer's price (bid) and a seller's price (ask), and the "last traded price" you see quoted is just wherever the most recent trade happened to cross between the two.

Bids aren't fixed; they move constantly as traders place, cancel, and fill orders. A stack of bids at different price levels (sometimes visible in a tool called depth of market or Level 2) shows how much buying interest exists below the current price, which traders use to gauge support.