It's a good start. When I say what's "wrong" I don't just mean what's "incorrect".... Using the definition of wrong from dictionary.com :-
Youve got a Bot doing trades at tiny volume to prop the price up or to keep a cap on it. Shouldnt happen but it does
Good Lord! Surely you aren't suggesting that there is evidence of price manipulation here are you!?? I thought only conspiritards believed in such things
Looks like nobody else wants to play 1. The Last Trade doesn't match the most recent in the Last 10 Trades column 2. The Last 10 Trades are all at a price that I can't even bid at 3. The Market Depth shows no buyers or sellers at this trading price 4. The Volume on the last trades show trades amounting to only a few cents 5. These tiny trades have flooded the Last 10 Trades column so I can't see any real trades I've been buying and selling shares for years and I don't normally trade in low cap stocks, but after investing in SLR and seeing this I did a bit of research into this new exchange Chi-X. I have always been wary of insider trading in share markets, but I was also always of the opinion that (on a technical level atleast) it was a fairly level playing field. Well, I don't think that any more. The fact that Chi-X can trade in finer increments and be practically "invisible" in the market depth gives them a pretty massive advantage in trading small caps like SLR as they can "jump the queue" and intercept any buyers/sellers who want (or need) to bid across the spread. The tiny volumes being traded also suggests that normal brokerage fees don't really apply - I mean, seriously, who makes a trade of 2 shares at 14.3 cents? As aussiesilver hinted at, this activity also reeks of price manipulation. The introduction of this new Chi-X exchange (in the name of creating competition) has really just delivered another significant advantage to the financial oligarchy over regular investors. Does anyone else have an explanation (or justification) that can legitimise what I'm seeing here?
I'll have a play. 1. Going by the time stamps I'd guess your Last 10 Trades data has not updated for the most recent minute, and is not showing the most recent low. What is the refresh rate? It would be interesting to see the screen shot a couple of minutes later to see if these trades appeared in this column. Not sure what you are using for this info, but if you are a paid subscriber, or if it is a screen shot of your online-broking platform... then I'd switch to someone else. If you are not a paid subscriber, then delayed data is the norm. 2. ???? Not sure what you mean here? You could have bid at this price? You could have bid at any price. 3. ??? You are right in your observation, but this is not unusual. 4. ??? You are again right in your observation, but again this is not unusual. 5. See 3. & 4. Right again. Retail brokerage fees are not applied for majority of share transactions. Small trades can be a result of cross-trades, or of third-party platforms balancing their hedges, etc,etc. Personally, I don't really see anything wrong with the screen (assuming 1. is due to delayed data). IMO, the most conspicuous fopar in this thread is the eagerness of some to jump on the manipulation theory as an explanation for a misunderstanding.
Most likely a broker using Chi-X is dealing for both the buyer and the seller of those shares. The broker does the deal on their own Chi-X based platform and simply report it to the ASX (which is cheap), rather than using the ASX to facilitate the trade (which is expensive). The small number of shares being shown in the trades column represents the notification to the ASX via a token trade and there is some ratio to work out a ballpark figure for how many shares were actually exchanged, but I can't remember the formula. Brokers using the ASX can do this too, so it's not limited to users of Chi-X and it's called a "crossing" (of which there are a few types). The fact that those trades are for 0.143 whereas trades above 10c are listed in the Buyers/Sellers columns at half cent increments indicates that the broker is using a crossing system based on a mid-point price or volume weighted average price. They do this to ensure transparency (the broker isn't favoring the buyer over the seller by executing at the lower price, or vice versa) and to avoid influencing the rest of the market. It looks like the E*Trade platform can't do fractions to that many decimal places above a 10c price, so they might have received notice that the trade took place at 14.25c and rounded it up to 14.3c or down to 14.2c.
Yep I've had that happen with Commsec and my transaction showed as a cross trade in the trade history. I have sometimes noticed some stocks seem to have lots of regular little trades of 1 or 2 shares all through the day. I reckon somebody is purposely pushing up the number of trades on the stock so it will get the attention of chartists in their market scans.
Those are the "crossings". The broker handling both sides of the trade is required to report that they occurred but they report a token number of shares changing hands, rather than the full amount. I called my broker one day to ask WTF was with two guys trading 1 x $0.32 share backwards and forwards and they explained what was going on. The specific number of shares does mean something, but I can't remember what. It might be 12 shares reported = 1,200 shares actually changing hands among customers of the one broker who reports the trade.
Thanks for the info people. The 14.25c averaging might explain why the last trade is 14.2c (rounded down) in contradiction to the 14.3c (rounded up) shown in the Last 10 Trades. To date I haven't seen any trades at 14.1 or 14.4 so it's a reasonable explanation. As is the explanation for the small volume trades. I don't agree that it is necessarily right to report trades in this way, but at least it is not as sinister as I thought it might have been.
