Fair Value - Fair Value Vs Market Price

Fair Value Vs Market Price

There are two schools of thought about the relation between the market price and fair value in any kind of market, but especially with regard to tradable assets:

  • The efficient market hypothesis asserts that, in a well organized, reasonably transparent market, the market price is generally equal to or close to the fair value, as investors react quickly to incorporate new information about relative scarcity, utility, or potential returns in their bids; see also Rational pricing.
  • Behavioral finance asserts that the market price often diverges from fair value because of various, common cognitive biases among buyers or sellers. However, even proponents of behavioral finance generally acknowledge that behavioral anomalies that may cause such a divergence often do so in ways that are unpredictable, chaotic, or otherwise difficult to capture in a sustainably profitable trading strategy, especially when accounting for transaction costs.

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Famous quotes containing the words market price, fair, market and/or price:

    A sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    May we not assure ourselves that whatever woman’s thought and study shall embrace will thereby receive a new inspiration, that she will save science from materialism, and art from a gross realism; that the “eternal womanly shall lead upward and onward”?
    Louisa Parsons Hopkins, U.S. scientist and author. As quoted in The Fair Women, ch. 16, by Jeanne Madeline Weimann (1981)

    ... married women work and neglect their children because the duties of the homemaker become so depreciated that women feel compelled to take a job in order to hold the respect of the community. It is one thing if women work, as many of them must, to help support the family. It is quite another thing—it is destructive of woman’s freedom—if society forces her out of the home and into the labor market in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.
    Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)

    For what were all these country patriots born?
    To hunt, and vote, and raise the price of corn?
    George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)