Material Amount Definition

In the world of trading and investments, the material amount is the degree that a security's price changes in a certain time period, to the extent that it confirms or refutes the trader's original prediction about the security's performance.

In a more general sense, a material amount can signify any sum or figure worth mentioning, as in financial statements, shareholder reports or conference calls. If something is not a material amount, it is considered too insignificant to mention.

The material amount a security moves either validates or confounds a trader's projections. If the material amount confirms the projection, the trader should continue pursuing the trading strategy he based his predictions on.

But if the material amount is a move that goes against the trader's initial projection, the trader should reassess his trading approach. More pragmatically, the move should trigger a stop-loss trade, to minimize any losses resulting from the inaccurate projection.

There is no one universal material amount; the exact number that is considered a material amount is different for every trade. As a result, what would be viewed as a favorable material amount for one instrument or security may be considered insufficient for another one. Traders must determine what they deem a significant and therefore acceptable degree of variance in the movement of the security price with each new investment they make, and take immediate action should the numbers move outside those perimeters. Identifying this acceptable movement range makes it easier to determine what action to take as prices fluctuate a little throughout the trading day.

While the exact numbers vary, the range of a material amount must be big enough to be deemed significant by common-sense standards. In the case of stock, some slight movement throughout the trading day would probably not be of much interest to company shareholders and as such would probably not be shared in any meeting with investors.

Only if the material amount shifts enough to indicate that the share prices are definitely moving according to predictions (or even exceeding them), or that prices are moving in a direction dramatically different from those predictions, will any sort of announcement occur.

When the material amount confirms that a trader's estimates of a security's movements and prices are accurate, it can act as a rationale as grounds for buying or selling more units of that security (shares of a stock, or bonds, or whatever the security is) than originally planned. On the other hand, if the material amount is not in keeping with the original predictions, traders may protect their interests by initiating a stop-loss order, which effectively limits the amount of money they can lose if the prices continue in the contrary direction.

Since accuracy in projecting price movements is key, many investors and traders make use of technical analysis as well as their own instincts to determine a material amount. This, in turn, makes it easier to decide on the action to take when that movement does not coincide with the performance as originally estimated.

It is often thought that predicting the material amount can be more important to a profitable trading system than actually predicting the price movement correctly. Traders who set this number wrong in their systems risk being stopped out early or taking too much risk.

• The material amount is the degree that a security's price changes in a certain time period, either confirming or refuting a trader's projections.
• It is often thought that predicting the material amount can be more important to a profitable trading system than actually predicting the price movement correctly.
• No one universal material amount exists; the exact number that is considered a material amount is different for every trade.