Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Can you sell stocks/commodities for any price you wish (either direct or market)?
I think for this a picture is worth a thousand words.  This is a "depth chart" that I pulled from google images, specifically because it doesn't name any security.  On the left you have all of the "bids" to buy this security, on the right you have the "asks" to sell the security.  In the middle you have the bid/ask spread, this is the space between the highest bid and the lowest ask.  As you can see you are free to place you order to the market to buy for 232, and someone else is free to place their order to the market to sell for 234.  When the bid and the ask match there's a transaction for the maximum number of available shares.  Alternatively, someone can place a market order to buy or sell and they'll just take the current market price. Retail investors don't really get access to this kind of chart from their brokers because for the most part the information isn't terribly relevant at the retail level.