That's the case with anything in large amounts. I can say I have $147M in Microsoft stock, but that doesn't mean I can sell the stock suddenly in one minute without making the price tank.
> I can say I have $147M in Microsoft stock, but that doesn't mean I can sell the stock suddenly in one minute without making the price tank.
Actually you can. Bill Gates sold off over $700M of stock over the course of a week at the end of Oct/beginning of Nov[1] and took a price that deviated by only $0.16 (~0.5%).
But you're actually agreeing with me anyway. Absurd valuations for quantities not readily absorbable by the market can't be priced until someone actually tries to sell/buy that quantity. There's no doubt however that if someone want to cash this volume out today their not looking at the market price. Who's going to buy at $700 when someone is trying to rid themselves of 2% of the entire currency base? To put that in perspective, Bill Gates currently owns only 0.4% of MSFT and wouldn't be able to (publicly) sell that much in a day without crashing the market.
