# Small trades - How come?



## oremo (9 January 2008)

Why is it that sometimes a trade goes through for say 12 shares at a higher or lower price driving the share price up or down for such a small trade?

Is it manipulation or a filling of a partially filled order?

Thanks in advance

Oremo


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## tronic72 (9 January 2008)

Usually a partially filler order. I've has orders broken up into half a dozen parcels. It's annoying but a fact of life. There may be other reasons but I'm not aware of them.


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## oremo (9 January 2008)

Thanks for that. Another lesson learnt

Oremo


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## BigJohnny (9 January 2008)

For stocks in the ASX 200 index, you will find sometimes the smaller parcels are the black box program trading or index arbitrage trading from bigger insto's. For example, today in NCM the last hour of trading, you would have seen the stock price move rapidly up and down. These were the machines looking for an equilibrium price to sell down to, but no buyers were available until below 39.00 and then the machines stopped generating sell orders. In other stocks you will see orders jumping ahead your best bid/offer within a milli second of you placing your order. The information this provides, is a reference to where the program traders are willing to buy(underpriced)/sell(overpriced) a stock relative to the SPI 200 futures.


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## xyzedarteerf (10 January 2008)

BigJohnny said:


> These were the machines looking for an equilibrium price to sell down to, but no buyers were available until below 39.00 and then the machines stopped generating sell orders. In other stocks you will see orders jumping ahead your best bid/offer within a milli second of you placing your order. The information this provides, is a reference to where the program traders are willing to buy(underpriced)/sell(overpriced) a stock relative to the SPI 200 futures.




Are these trading machines present in Derivatives as well??


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## Trembling Hand (10 January 2008)

xyzedarteerf said:


> Are these trading machines present in Derivatives as well??




You can bet you house on it. They run the Derivatives market


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## tronic72 (10 January 2008)

Have a great example in my portfolio at the moment. An order to sell 5000 CFDs with only 52 been filled.


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## Timmy (10 January 2008)

This is a really interesting thread.

There is a series of articles on program trading here, with links to various other articles as well.


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## Timmy (10 January 2008)

"A third of all EU and US stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC"  Quoted from Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know...) article on algorithmic trading.


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## xyzedarteerf (11 January 2008)

Timmy said:


> "A third of all EU and US stock trades in 2006 were driven by automatic programs, or algorithms, according to Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group LLC"  Quoted from Wikipedia (yeah, yeah, I know...) article on algorithmic trading.




well thats just great. so were up against machines with no emotions. i often wonder how buy bids go through without going through the queue so this is why. 
i guess you cant prosecute a machine for inside trading hehehehe.


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## KIWIKARLOS (11 January 2008)

automatic buy/sells for small parcels at values above and below market value can also be used to kick in other automated buy / sells. This is particularily the case when the SP is gapping up.

I know withy MAE a while back everyday at final auction a sell order would be placed at 4.02pm at a specific amount from the sell price before it. The orders were always for a $500 parcel and i think it was done to encourage other sellers to place sells below this order which would then be snapped up by the "seller" who also actually had larger buy orders in.

A sort of way to try push down the price for accumulation.


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## Rough_Trade (11 January 2008)

BigJohnny said:


> For stocks in the ASX 200 index, you will find sometimes the smaller parcels are the black box program trading or index arbitrage trading from bigger insto's. For example, today in NCM the last hour of trading, you would have seen the stock price move rapidly up and down. These were the machines looking for an equilibrium price to sell down to, but no buyers were available until below 39.00 and then the machines stopped generating sell orders. In other stocks you will see orders jumping ahead your best bid/offer within a milli second of you placing your order. The information this provides, is a reference to where the program traders are willing to buy(underpriced)/sell(overpriced) a stock relative to the SPI 200 futures.




If you want to see one of these "black box" or "trading bots" in action just watch the market depth on SLX for a while.


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## gamelodge (22 February 2010)

*Lots of small trades*

Hi Guys

I am new to trading, and i was wondering if you could help me understand why some stocks have lots of very small trades? is this a form of price manipulation or some sort of tactic to get price to move?

an example of what I mean is this:

VBA: 

see the list of sales (as taken from comsec)
see how many small trades there are at 0.630 why is that?


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## nunthewiser (22 February 2010)

*Re: Lots of small trades*

Algo trades . do a search here , it has been covered ..... nothing sinister just a type of order


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## SuperGlue (22 February 2010)

IB do offer algorithms trading (Accumulate / Distribute Algorithm) if anyone is interested.

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When to Use

This order type is geared towards traders of large position blocks as well as high frequency traders and is intended to run unattended while logged into the TWS
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If you can't beat them join them.

Don't know what the brokerage is like. Do a search on "Alogrithm" on IB webpage.


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