Very low or no $ volume

I have zero experience in this and need some insight from those who do.

This relates to this thread

I gleaned a little from this thread but not enough.


Could you please respond, if you have ACTUALLY bought and sold micro / nano caps, and what your experience has been?


I'm not looking at selection methods or anything like that.

There seems to be 2 types about:

a) The stock that trades regularly...but simply at a low $ volume. Today I posted a stock in the above thread that trades 3 days a week on average. On the days it actually trades, the average $ volume is ~$10k (median around $6.5k)

b) The stocks that just don't trade. Maybe a couple times a year. The free float might only be 10% of the total shares outstanding. In one case, I found it to be around 2%.

If you've traded either or both of these situations...any info about your experience would be appreciated.

Have you used limit orders? How long did it take you to get in / out? Did you find your buy (sell) price to be similar or very different to the current offer (bid)?

systematic said:

I have zero experience in this and need some insight from those who do.

Could you please respond, if you have ACTUALLY bought and sold micro / nano caps, and what your experience has been?

Click to expand...

Limit orders can take a very long time to get filled, i would estimate that about 50% of the time i have lost patience and cancelled the order or moved the price up/down to a buyer/seller...average time for a limit order to get filled has been around 2 or 3 weeks.

Often the buy side is only 3 or 4 orders, trick is to be first in the queue, often this is easy due to persistent low ball buyers with orders 15 to 30% under the sell price, with selling i generally wait until a large buyer appears and then simply decide if that's a price i want to take, had to wait 3 weeks once for a partial sale to get completed at the same price.

A lot of patience is required when dealing with low volume micros, a bit of persistance and determination helps as well.

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The b) The stocks that just don't trade - i have tried to purchase a few of these over the years with zero success, sometimes there are simply no sellers so its not like you can even trade at market, i had a couple of buy orders (first in the que) that were unfilled for 30 days and the orders timed out.

Very similar experience to So_Cynical. My most illiquid company is one on the NSX and one has to go thru the expensive route of full service broking to be able to even place an order.

I had to wait weeks to get in, made sure I was head of the queue, I valued the company as so much more than its trading at that I wasnt concerned at setting the bar a bit higher than it had yet been. Took quite a bit to get a seller to the table! A couple of other interested buyers chased up behind me, I guess in the hope of being filled with any overflow. It wasnt to be. I got my parcel and that was it.

Its a whole differnent game psychologically to whacking in a buy order on Commsec for a liquid company!