Term: Selling the Bid

"Selling the bid" means selling your shares immediately at the highest price currently being offered by buyers, rather than waiting for a possibly better price. To understand it, you need to picture the order book: at any moment, there's a "bid" price (the highest amount buyers are currently willing to pay) and an "ask" price (the lowest amount sellers are currently willing to accept), and the ask is always a bit higher than the bid — that gap is called the spread.

When you sell the bid, you're accepting the buyer's price on offer rather than trying to get a better one. In practice this happens when you place a market order to sell (which fills against whatever the best available bid is) or a marketable limit order set at or below the current bid. Either way, you are the one giving up the spread — you take a slightly worse price in exchange for a fast, certain fill.

The alternative is "asking" or "offering" — placing your sell order at the ask price (or higher) and waiting for a buyer to come to you. That can get you a better price, but there's no guarantee anyone will take it, especially if the stock is moving fast or thinly traded.

The nuance that trips people up: selling the bid isn't inherently good or bad, it's a trade-off between speed/certainty and price. In a fast-moving or volatile stock, the bid can drop rapidly, so insisting on a better price while waiting can mean missing the exit altogether. Selling the bid guarantees you get out now, at the cost of a few cents (or sometimes much more, if the spread is wide) compared to holding out.