Learn the stock market › Read a stock chart › Lesson 3 of 6
Volume: the bars under the price
AMD: price and volume around Nov 5, 2026
What volume counts
Every trade has a buyer and a seller. Volume counts the shares in each trade once, so it is the same for the buyers as for the sellers. There are never more shares bought than sold. What moves the price is the price at which buyers and sellers meet.
On an ordinary day over the last year about 29.3 million AMD shares traded. A volume says most against the stock's own ordinary days, because a company with many shares always trades more of them than one with few.
The busiest days
The five days of the last year when AMD's volume was highest against the 50 trading days before:
| Date | Volume, millions of shares | Times the usual | Price that day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 5, 2026 | 71.2 | 3.8 | −17.3% |
| Feb 4, 2026 | 107.2 | 3.4 | −17.3% |
| Nov 4, 2026 | 51.0 | 2.7 | +1.0% |
| Feb 24, 2026 | 81.4 | 2.6 | +8.8% |
| May 6, 2026 | 87.7 | 2.5 | +18.6% |
On Nov 5, 2026 71.2 million shares traded, 3.8 times the usual, and the price moved −17.3%. Busy days tend to be days with new information, such as earnings, a bid for the company or big news for the whole market. Volume alone does not say what the news was.
Does the price move more when volume is high?
For AMD it did.
Over the last 1,260 trading days, since November 2021, volume was at least twice the usual on 59 days. On those days the typical move, the median, was 6.4% up or down. On the other days it was 1.9%. That is how large the moves were, not which way they went.
Indicators that combine volume and price, such as OBV and VWAP, are in Volume indicators. How much volume rises on the biggest days, across the largest companies, is in Volume on big moves.
Test yourself
A day's volume is 10 million shares. How many shares were bought that day?
More numbers are on the AMD page.