Nothing divided by something is nothing.

@gondwanalon Has a stock, or whatever, been at $0.00 and gone up? Even a little? How would the ticker process it as? Would the ticker crash? What happened last year when oil went from -$33? It must have passed zero at one point? What did the machine process the percent up or down?

That was an oversupply of oil and not a stock. A stock at zero might mean the company is bankrupt . . so the stock would stay there.

@Tropical_Willie I would like to include the whatever. When oil passed zero what percent did the whatever tracks the value say in percent? Also include temporary bankruptcies? I would like to know how a computer handles an increase of decrease percentage from zero? Would it give an error message or is it programmed to ignore changes from zero? Also an Initial public offering that starts at zero?

Yes you get an error message. ^^^^ Try it on your computer calculator. 5 divided by 0 equals “ERROR”

Price set before IPO stock is sold; it does not start at zero.

One way of looking at it is to say that the value of the stock increased infinitely. At $0 per share you can buy infinitely many shares and a $1 increase would give you infinitely much money.

Stock tickers don’t show the percentage gain or loss from the previous sale, they show the percentage gain or loss on the day. When oil traded at zero or negative, they showed the percentage loss from last night’s closing price.

So if I were to buy 10,000 shares at zero dollars. It would only cost me the transaction fee.

@Tropical_Willie as a child I found a couple of stocks in the news paper that where $0.005 a share. Half a cent. I should have bought some for giggles. Instead I bought some netendo games.

@Tropical_Willie If you could buy it at zero. And these days you don’t even have to pay a commission. But no one will sell it to you at zero. We have special trades on the exchange to close out positions, they are called “Cabinet trades”, but even they must trade at a value of at least $0.00001. The system won’t process a trade at zero. And generally, the buyer must be closing out a position to trade at that price.

delta / initial = 1.00/0.00 = infinite