Australian (ASX) Stock Market Forum

Small trades - How come?

Joined
3 January 2008
Posts
20
Reactions
0
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:confused:
 
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.
 
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.
 
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??
 
Have a great example in my portfolio at the moment. An order to sell 5000 CFDs with only 52 been filled.
 
This is a really interesting thread.

There is a series of articles on program trading here, with links to various other articles as well.
 
"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...:D) article on algorithmic trading.
 
"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...:D) 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.:D:D
 
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.
 
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.
 
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?
 

Attachments

  • vba.jpg
    vba.jpg
    46.7 KB · Views: 1
Re: Lots of small trades

Algo trades . do a search here , it has been covered ..... nothing sinister just a type of order
 
IB do offer algorithms trading (Accumulate / Distribute Algorithm) if anyone is interested.

----------------------
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
-----------------------

If you can't beat them join them.

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