strong buy, page-30

Not a problem Castlebuilder, this is how it works:

The sp is trading at 1.4 cents and minutes prior to close Mr B sells 30k at 1.3 cents. At 4:00:00pm regular trading is closed for the day and all normal trading stocks are placed in pre-open, pending the closing auction which takes place at no earlier than 4:10:00pm.

To simplify things, let's assume that Mr B and Mr S are the only two who have placed orders in the closing auction. Also, prior to 4:00:00pm there are buyers in the queue at 1.3 cents, and sellers at 1.4 cents.

Ok, during the auction, Mr B places a buy order for 2m at 1.4 cents, and Mr S places a 1.5m sell order at 1.3 cents. At this point, both the buy and sell orders are sitting on top of the queues, so we have a match price of 1.4 cents since the additional 500k of Mr B's order will hit the seller on top of the 1.4 sell queue. What Mr B does next is to amend his order down to 1,499,999 shares seconds prior to the end of the day's auction. If Mr S is not awake to the amended order and/or is too late to amend or cancel his order, his sell will be executed and return him 1.3 cents since the 1 share overflow of his order will hit the top of the buyers queue, which as we know was 1.3 cents. Bear in mind that there is only one MATCH price during any pre-open.

The same rules apply to the open of trades for the day, with the exception that pre-open is divided into 5 groups, e.g. stock codes commencing with the letters 'A' and 'B' are Group 1 and set to open at between 9:59:45am and on or after 10:00:15am.

I want to make this clear, and I stand to be corrected here, retail traders only know the official stock market opening and closing times, whereas stock brokers have a asx clock, which places them at a distinct advantage over us since they know the actual opening and closing times. The other thing I must point out is that a NXXT crossing (National Best Bid and Offer) can jump the queue, so any overflows in situations explained in our example above, where a NXXT crossing exists, will not necessarily hit the order on top of the queue.