Companies raise money by soliciting the public to buy shares in their company. These shares comprise a stock.
Volume
Stock price reflects the balance between supply and demand. Volume signifies participation, which indicates conviction.
Volume is the number of shares traded across the ticks that comprise a bar. As a signal, volume is relative: meaningful only when comparing recent volume against a baseline.
Volume acts as an amplifier of price: without it, price moves are whispers; with it, price shouts. It is a well-known maxim that volume precedes price.
ETFs
Clever financiers look for new ways to make money from money. In 1993, State Street Global Advisors created the 1st exchange-traded fund (ETF): SPY, which was designed to track the performance of the S&P 500 index. SPY is a stock that algorithmically mimics a contrived basket of stocks.
An ETF is a stock concoction: an investment fund packaged as a stock. Most ETFs are passively managed, tracking an index, but some are actively managed by portfolio managers.
ETFs started as a quiet alternative to mutual funds. They have since burgeoned into a cornerstone of retail investing, allow investors to lazily conceive that they have a diversified portfolio by the simple purchase of a single stock. There are now ETFs for most every investment basket imaginable.
ETFs are similar in many ways to mutual funds. But, whereas a mutual fund is an investment fund that pools money from many investors to buy stocks, an ETF is a fabricated fund that trades as a stock.
ETFs are 99+% algorithmic. An ETF is only allowed to deviate negligibly from its selected index before nanny software puts it back in line. In other words, retail trading only matters to an ETF as a minor ripple.
4 high-volume ETFs are noteworthy: SPY, IWM, IBIT, and GDX. SPY represents the S&P 500. IWM represents the Russell 2000. IBIT is a bitcoin ETF: good if you like your stocks unmoored to financial reality. GDX is a gold ETF. At the onset of troubling economic times, the price of gold soars as a song sung in fear.
ETFs do not qualify as minuteable stocks because their microstructure is inherently derivative driven, volatility dampened, catalyst absent, spread compressed, and flow smoothed. In short, ETFs are sterile.