lynas share price momentum, page-17

@noairbags: as has been pointed out already - but maybe more than one explanation is needed to make sense of it - that is just the closing auction.

You need to read up how the ASX works. There is an auction period of a couple of hours pre-open, where bids and offers are placed, and then the opening price is the matched price that includes the majority of the trades. The closing auction happens for 10 minutes, from 16:00 to 16:10 (plus or minus some seconds) and is the same principle. The buys and sells are placed, but no trades executed for that 10-minute period.

The computers "know" what the matched price is (and it can be seen on most trading platforms, or even the Commsec website quote page) and the sellers will try to jump the queue and put sells on at progressively lower and lower prices to make sure their trades get executed on the roll-through at 16:10. Same with the buys - they put in higher and higher buy prices to get ahead of the queue.

But it doesn't matter what actual price they put on the buy and sell - the price that the trade actually goes through at is the matched price - which then becomes the closing price for the day.

The bots sometimes go crazy in that closing auction, especially the last 30 sec. of it, as they juggle orders and prices up and down to determine the closing price for the day.