Price Improvement

Whoa, you just found $20 in your pocket. Score.

That’s the same feeling investors get when they realize they just benefitted from price improvement.

Price improvement is when you place an order to buy or sell a stock, and then you get a better deal at the time your order was executed than when you placed it.

Brokerage Jimmy Shmoo might argue that they’re good at price improvement, using it as a selling point. They say they placed an order for stock FlowerPower at $200 per stock, and it was executed at $190 per stock. That’s a price improvement of $10 per stock. Nice.

It goes the other way, too. Maybe you were okay with selling your TruckMuck stock at $40 per, but then it actually sells for $45. Yeahhhh, man. That good ol’ just-found-money-in-my-pocket feeling. Lucky duck.