Liquidity: What Is It?
When a financial asset or security may be quickly and easily converted into cash without depreciating in value, this is referred to as having liquidity. Cash alone is the most liquid of all the assets.
Liquidity: An Understanding
In other words, the degree to which an asset may be swiftly purchased or sold on the market at a price representing its underlying value is referred to as liquidity. Due to its ease and speed of conversion into other assets, cash is regarded as the most liquid asset. Real estate, fine art, and collectibles are examples of tangible goods that are all rather illiquid. Other financial assets fall at various points throughout the liquidity spectrum, from stocks to partnership units.
Cash, for instance, is the resource that can be utilized to buy a $1,000 refrigerator most readily. The likelihood of finding someone willing to exchange them the refrigerator for their collection is slim if they have no cash but a rare book collection worth $1,000. They will have to sell the collection instead, then use the proceeds to pay for the refrigerator. If the person has months or years to wait before making the purchase, it might be okay, but if the person only had a few days, it might be problematic. Instead of waiting for a buyer who was prepared to pay the full amount, they might have to sell the books at a discount. An illustration of an illiquid asset is rare books.
Market liquidity and accounting liquidity are the two primary indicators of liquidity.
Trade Liquidity
Market liquidity describes how easily assets may be purchased and sold in a market, such as the stock exchange of a nation or the real estate market of a city, at predictable, open prices. In the aforementioned case, the market for refrigerators in exchange for rare books is so unviable that it essentially does not exist.
On the other side, the stock market has a larger level of market liquidity. The price a buyer offers per share (the bid price) and the price a seller is ready to take (the ask price) will be very close to one another if an exchange has a significant volume of transaction that is not dominated by selling.
Therefore, investors won’t have to forfeit unrealized gains in exchange for a speedy sale. The market is more liquid when the difference between the bid and ask prices narrows; conversely, when it widens, the market becomes less liquid. Real estate markets typically have much lower levels of liquidity than stock markets. The size and number of open exchanges on which markets for other assets, such as futures, contracts, currencies, or commodities, can be exchanged frequently affects how liquid those markets are.
Financial Liquidity
Accounting liquidity evaluates a person’s or a business’s ability to easily satisfy their financial commitments with the liquid assets at their disposal—their capacity to settle debts when they become due.
The rare book collector in the case above has somewhat illiquid assets, so they probably wouldn’t be worth their full $1,000 value in an emergency. Assessing accounting liquidity in terms of investments entails contrasting liquid assets with current liabilities, or debts that are due within a year.
Accounting liquidity is measured by a number of ratios, each of which has a different definition of “liquid assets.” These are used by analysts and investors to find organizations with high liquidity. It is also regarded as a depth measurement.
Example of Liquidity
Equities are one of the most liquid asset classes when it comes to investments. But in terms of liquidity, not all stocks are created equal. On stock exchanges, some shares are traded more frequently than others, indicating that there is a larger market for them. In other words, traders and investors show a higher and more persistent interest in them. The daily volume of these liquid equities, which can range from millions to hundreds of millions of shares, is typically what allows investors to identify them.
For instance, 8.4 million shares of Amazon.com (AMZN) traded on the NASDAQ on April 26, 2019. It may sound like a lot of liquidity, but it is still much less than, for example, Intel (INTC), which led the NASDAQ that day with a volume of 72 million shares, or Ford Motor (F), which led the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) that day with a volume of 156 million shares, making it the most liquid stock in the United States that day.
