Why did the price of ASH common stock drop when the market opened on May 15, 2017?
Ashland Global Holdings Inc. (ASH) sold off their ownership in Valvoline Inc. (VVV).  Friday, May 12 was the distribution date of the sale; at the end of the day, every stockholder of ASH received 2.745338 shares of VVV stock for each share of ASH held.  That is why the value of ASH has dropped significantly on open this morning. Sources:
"Something to note is that when a company announces a share buyback program there is usually a time frame and amount of shares that are important details as it isn't like the company will make one big buy back of stock generally.  Rather it may take months or even years as noted in the Wikipedia article about share repurchases. Wikipedia covers some of the technical details here but to give a specific set of answers: When a company announces a share buyback program, who do they actually   buy back the shares from?  From the Wikipedia link: ""Under US corporate law there are five primary methods of stock repurchase: open market, private negotiations, repurchase 'put' rights, and two variants of self-tender repurchase: a fixed price tender offer and a Dutch auction."" Thus, there are open market and a couple of other possibilities. Openly traded shares on a stock exchange?  Possibly, though there are other options. Is there a fixed price that   they buy back at? Sometimes.  I'd think a ""fixed price tender offer"" would imply a fixed price though the open market way may take various prices. If I own shares in that company, can I get them to buy back my shares? Selective Buy-Backs is noted in Wikipedia as: ""In broad terms, a selective buy-back is one in which identical offers are not made to every shareholder, for example, if offers are made to only some of the shareholders in the company. In the US, no special shareholder approval of a selective buy-back is required. In the UK, the scheme must first be approved by all shareholders, or by a special resolution (requiring a 75% majority) of the members in which no vote is cast by selling shareholders or their associates. Selling shareholders may not vote in favor of a special resolution to approve a selective buy-back. The notice to shareholders convening the meeting to vote on a selective buy-back must include a statement setting out all material information that is relevant to the proposal, although it is not necessary for the company to provide information already disclosed to the shareholders, if that would be unreasonable."" Thus it is possible, though how probable is another question. While not in the question, something to consider is how the buybacks can be done as a result of offsetting the dilution of employees who have stock options that may exercise them and spread the earnings over more shares, but this is more on understanding the employee stock option scenario that various big companies use when it comes to giving employees an incentive to help the stock price." "It depends on how the program is run. If the company runs the program out of treasury stock (shares that are authorized, but not issued), then there aren't any shares being purchased on the open market.   Because of that, the share price wouldn't be affected.    If you look in your employer's annual report, you will probably find how the program is run and how many shares are issued annually under that program. By comparing that to the daily trading volume of the company's stock you can gauge whether there's any likelihood of the share price being affected by the employee purchases. That is, of course, if shares are being purchased on the open market.  For example, here is Books-A-Million's program, as described in their 2011 annual report: Employee Stock Purchase Plan   The Company maintains an employee stock purchase plan under which shares of the Company’s common stock are reserved   for purchase by employees at 85% of the fair market value of the common stock at the lower of the market value for the   Company’s stock as of the beginning of the fiscal year or the end of the fiscal year. On May 20, 2010, the stockholders of the   Company approved an additional 200,000 shares available for issuance under the plan, bringing the aggregate number of   shares that may be awarded to 600,000. Of the total reserved shares, 391,987, 373,432 and 289,031 shares have been   purchased as of January 29, 2011, January 30, 2010 and January 31, 2009, respectively. This describes an instance of the employee purchase program being run from unissued stock, not open market purchases. From it, we can tell 18,555 shares were issued during the past fiscal year.  As their average daily volume is ~40,000 shares, if the program were run from a single open market purchase, it would have potential to ""move the market"".  One would think, though, that a company running it from open market purchases would spread the purchases over a period of time to avoid running up the price on themselves." Is there not some central service that tracks current currency rates that banks can use to get currency data? Sure.  But this doesn't matter.  All the central service can tell you is how much the rate was historically.  But the banks/PayPal don't care about the historical value.  They want to know the price that they'll pay when they get around to switching, not the last price before the switch.  Beyond that, there is a transaction cost to switching.  They have to pay the clearinghouse for managing the transaction.   The banks can choose to act as a clearinghouse, but that increases their risk.  If the bank has a large balance of US dollars but dollars are falling, then they end up eating that cost.  They'll only take that risk if they think that they'll make more money that way.  And in the end, they may have to go on the currency market anyway.  If a European bank runs out of US dollars, they have to buy them on the open market.  Or a US bank might run out of Euros.  Or Yen.  Etc.   Another problem is that many of the currency transactions are small, but the overhead is fixed.  If the bank has to pay $5 for every currency transaction, they won't even break even charging 3% on a $100 transaction.  So they delay the actual transaction so that they can make more than one at a time.  But then they have the risk that the currency value might change in the meantime.  If they credit you with $97 in your account ($100 minus the 3% fee) but the price actually drops from $100 to $99, they're out the $1.   They could do it the other way as well.  You ask for a $100 transaction.  They perform a $1000 transaction, of which they give you $97.  Now they have $898 ($1000 minus the $5 they paid for the transaction plus the $3 they charged you for the transaction).  If there's a 1% drop, they're out $10.98 ($8.98 in currency loss plus a net $2 in fees).   This is why banks have money market accounts.  So they have someone to manage these problems working twenty-four hours a day.  But then they have to pay interest on those accounts, further eating into their profits.  Along with paying a staff to monitor the currency markets and things that may affect them. This is an old question that has an accepted answer, but it has gotten bumped due to an edit and the answers given are incorrect. I am assuming this means that every other Friday, the company is going into the open public market, buying those shares and then giving it out to the employees. No. Companies will internally hold shares that it intends to offer employees as additional compensation. There are no open market transactions, so the market price of the stock does not change (at least not due to buying pressure).  The only net effect is an equivalent expense for the compensation, but that should already be accounted for in the share price as normal operating expenses. These share may come through an initial buyback from the market, but more common is that when companies issue new shares they keep some internally for exactly this situation.  If they issued new shares every pay period, it would dilute the existing shares several times a quarter which would be difficult to account for. Are you really talking about share price, or share value? Because what about stock splits? Market Cap stays the same, but the price per share is lowered. This is so that the stock is more liquid and accessible to a greater number of investors. This encourages people to invest in the stock though. I can't really think of any reasons why a company would want to lower their share value or discourage people from investing unless they are trying to reacquire shares. Returning value to the shareholders is the #1 priority of any publicly traded company. yes, there is no doubt that people over bought, bought to flip and then got caught holding as the market corrected. Basic supply and demand. To be honest companies like Daniel Defense were constantly out of parts so for those not wanting to be gouged in the secondary market this will help. Your question is missing information. The most probable reason is that the company made a split or a dividend paid in stock and that you might be confusing your historical price (which is relevant for tax purposes) with your actual market price. It is VERY important to understand this concepts before trading stocks. "What most of these answers here seem to be missing is that a stock ""price"" is not exactly what we typically expect a price to be--for example, when we go in to the supermarket and see that the price of a gallon of milk is $2.00, we know that when we go to the cash register that is exactly how much we will pay.  This is not, however, the case for stocks. For stocks, when most people talk about the price or quote, they are really referring to the last price at which that stock traded--which unlike for a gallon of milk at the supermarket, is no guarantee of what the next stock price will be.  Relatively speaking, most stocks are extremely liquid, so they will react to any information which the ""market"" believes has a bearing on the value of their underlying asset almost (if not) immediately.  As an extreme example, if allegations of accounting fraud for a particular company whose stock is trading at $40 come out mid-session, there will not be a gradual decline in the price ($40 -> $39.99 -> $39.97, etc.)-- instead, the price will jump from $40 to say, $20.  In the time between the the $40 trade and the $20 trade, even though we may say the price of the stock was $40, that quote was actually a terrible estimate of the stock's current (post-fraud announcement) price. Considering that the ""price"" of a stock typically does not remain constant even in the span of a few seconds to a few minutes, it should not be hard to believe that this price will not remain constant over the 17.5 hour period from the previous day's close to the current day's open.  Don't forget that as Americans go to bed, the Asian markets are just opening, and by the time US markets have opened, it is already past 2PM in London.  In addition to the information (and therefore new knowledge) gained from these foreign markets' movements, macro factors can also play an important part in a security's price-- perhaps the ECB makes a morning statement that is interpreted as negative news for the markets or a foreign government before the US markets open.  Stock prices on the NYSE, NASDAQ, etc. won't be able to react until 9:30, but the $40 price of the last trade of a broad market ETF at 4PM yesterday probably isn't looking so hot at 6:30 this morning... don't forget either that most individual stocks are correlated with the movement of the broader market, so even news that is not specific to a given security will in all likelihood still have an impact on that security's price. The above are only a few of many examples of things that can impact a stock's valuation between close and open: all sorts of geopolitical events, announcements from large, multi-national companies, macroeconomic stats such as unemployment rates, etc. announced in foreign countries can all play a role in affecting a security's price overnight. As an aside, one of the answers mentioned after hours trading as a reason--in actuality this typically has very little (if any) impact on the next day's prices and is often referred to as ""amateur hour"", due to the fact that trading during this time typically consists of small-time investors.  Prices in AH are very poor predictors of a stock's price at open."