Ask Price

The ask price, also called the offer price, is the lowest price at which someone is currently willing to sell an asset. It is the price a buyer pays if they want to trade straight away rather than wait. Every quoted market, from shares and bonds to currencies and cryptocurrencies, shows an ask alongside a bid, the highest price a buyer is willing to pay. The gap between the two is the bid-ask spread.

The ask comes from the order book on an exchange, from quotes posted by a market maker or dealer, or from a formula in an automated market maker. In foreign exchange the ask is the rate at which a dealer sells a currency, the counterpart of the bid FX rate. In mutual funds a similar idea appears as the public offering price.

At a currency exchange booth at an airport, you see two prices for dollars: one at which the booth buys them from you and a higher one at which it sells them to you. The higher price is the ask. If you want dollars now, you pay that price, and the difference between the two prices is how the booth makes money.

Exchanges work the same way, except that the prices come from many people. The ask is simply the cheapest price any seller is offering at that moment. If you want to buy instantly, you take it.

The spread is calculated as:

It is often expressed as a percentage of the midpoint:

Suppose a token shows a bid of $9.95 and an ask of $10.05. The spread is $0.10, the midpoint is $10.00 and the percentage spread is 1%. A buyer who pays the ask and immediately sells at the bid loses $0.10 per token before fees. The midpoint, sometimes used as the mid-market rate in currency markets, is a common reference for the "fair" price. Narrow spreads signal deep liquidity; wide spreads signal low liquidity or high uncertainty.

On an exchange, sellers who want a specific price post a limit order to sell, which joins the ask side of the book. The lowest of these is the best ask. A buyer who sends a market order is matched against the best ask, and if the order is larger than the quantity available at that price, it continues to the next ask levels, paying more as it goes. The result is slippage. Traders who post orders are often called makers; those who take existing orders are takers, and exchanges commonly charge takers higher fees. Large clusters of sell orders at one price are sometimes called a sell wall.

An automated market maker has no list of sellers. Instead, a pricing formula sets the price based on the pool's balances, and the effective ask for a buyer rises with the size of the trade. Interfaces show a quoted price and an estimated price impact rather than a classic ask. Aggregators compare these quotes across pools and order-book venues to find the best effective ask for a given trade size.

Asks change constantly as sellers add, cancel or fill orders. News, changes in volatility, inventory pressures on market makers and trading in related markets all shift the ask. In fast markets, displayed asks can disappear before an order arrives, which is why traders use limit orders to cap the price they pay. Outside trading hours in traditional markets, quoted asks may be stale or very wide, while crypto markets quote continuously but can see spreads widen sharply during stress.

The displayed ask applies only to the quantity shown at that price, so it can understate the true cost of a large purchase. Quotes from a single venue may not reflect the best price available elsewhere. In thin markets, a few orders can make the ask misleading, and spoofed orders, placed and then cancelled to create a false impression, are a form of market manipulation that regulators prohibit.