A price move is never one thing. Separating the six is most of what reading a market means.
A share price is what someone paid. Behind any given move sit six distinguishable causes, and confusing them is how people learn the wrong lesson from a correct trade.
These two produce identical-looking moves and mean opposite things. If a company's earnings estimate falls ten per cent and the price falls ten per cent, nothing has changed about how the market values the business — it simply has less business to value. If earnings are untouched and the price still falls ten per cent, the market has decided this kind of company is worth less per unit of profit, which is usually a statement about interest rates rather than about the company.
The second kind is what a rate-hiking cycle does. When the risk-free rate rises, a future dollar of earnings is worth less today, so the multiple contracts across the whole market. Companies whose profits sit furthest in the future — high-growth, low-current-earnings — fall furthest, which is why growth stocks are described as rate-sensitive.
In Margin Call this is explicit: fair value is earnings per share multiplied by a target multiple, and that multiple is driven by rates, quantitative-easing stance, sector and expected growth duration. The two halves move independently and can be read separately.
A large buyer moves the price by consuming the sell orders resting above the current price. Nothing has been learned about the company; the price is higher because the available supply at lower prices was bought. This is why a price move on heavy volume with no news is a fact about liquidity rather than about value, and why it tends to decay.
It is also why size costs money. An order large enough to eat through several price levels pays a worse average price than the one quoted — that is slippage, and it is not a fee, it is arithmetic. Margin Call executes against a real order book with price-time priority, so the depth you can see is the depth you trade through.
The special case worth knowing is the short squeeze, where the buying is forced: short sellers closing positions must buy, and their buying raises the price, which forces more of them to close. The flow is self-reinforcing rather than informed, which is why squeezes overshoot and then give it all back.
Sentiment is the crowd leaning in one direction without new information — momentum chasing, sector rotation, general risk appetite. It is real, it moves prices, and it mean-reverts. Noise is what is left: prices move because markets are made of people and people trade for reasons that do not aggregate into anything.
The practical consequence is that most daily moves mean nothing. A stock down 1.2% on no news is not telling you anything, and treating it as a signal is how a strategy becomes a superstition.
Margin Call records this decomposition for every move and shows it as "WHY IT MOVED" — the six components with their actual contributions, reachable in one click from a holding. It is the most useful diagnostic in the game, because it settles the question a chart cannot: whether you were right for the reason you thought.
Where this shows up: