Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Trading Stock Takes Time

T+1

Say you are a big mutual fund and you own 1,000 shares of Stock X and you want to sell. You meet a pension fund that wants to buy 1,000 shares of Stock X, the pension fund comes to your office to negotiate a trade, and you agree on a price of, say, $14 per share. The pension fund reaches into its bag of cash, pulls out $14,000 in crisp $20 bills and hands them to you. You open up your vault, pull out a stock certificate that says “1,000 Shares of Stock X” and hand it to the pension fund. ...