buying and selling, page-2

earl,

Note the size of most of the trades and note the time spacing between them. In this case there appear to be two bots trading both on 5 minute intervals. Notice the regularity.

Also look at the trade sizes. They vary between $3 and $300. None of those trades are for marketable parcels and since real people wouldn't be stupid enough to place such small orders because brokerage would be too high a percentage of the outlay and it would be a pointless exercise given the volumes available @ 0.009 anyway.

A brokers is able to trade between their own accounts and still have the transaction go through the settlements system and thus you and I see it as a trade on our screens. Because the trade is matched by the brokers systems and not by the ASXs system these trades never touch the sell or sell queues that you see.

So if a broker or institution wants to play funny buggers by pushing through irrelevant trades to make it look like volumes are going through at a particular price then there really in nothing stopping them doing so/ They won't have the penatly of paying brokerage fees etc, just a small fee the the ASX.

So you are right to be skepticle. Always look at average trade size over a group of trades and the regularity of the trades. The signature of bots is usually obvious in such low turnover stocks.