Ann: Update - CE Marking Application, page-95

I still don't know if I've explained that well enough - at the point that OSL started trading this morning (well, Tuesday morning, as it's now past midnight) there was not a single bid left above 5.2c or a single offer left below 5.2c. Fact. Every single bid that was above 5.2c and every single offer that was below 5.2c was settled at 5.2c. That's how the opening auction works. You can watch it happen any morning. It's a staggered open, so not every stock starts trading at the same time. The closer your stock code is to the beginning of the alphabet, the earlier you will start trading. OSL would probably start trading at 10:04 or 10:05am Sydney time. Something like that. The opening price depends entirely on the market depth, with all overlapping bids and offers settled at the one opening price. Before the market opens, you can see the "indicative price" in the stock quote and the market movement (in Feihung's example above, the movement was +8% or +$0.004) is based on the indicative price. However, the indicative price is just that - indicative - and it changes as new bids and offers are added, adjusted or deleted (pulled). In this case they indicative price was $0.054 at the time Feihung took that snapshot from Commsec, but more offers were added below that price and/or some higher bids may have been pulled before the opening auction took place and OSL opened at 5.2c. All trades that occurred at prices higher than that were as a result of bids that were placed AFTER the open, because all bids over 5.2c before the open were settled at 5.2c. That's how the opening auction works. You can check the opening price for any trading day by looking at the trade history of a stock. In Commsec that's the tab between "Company Research" and "Charts" that you'll see above your stock quote.

I'm not trying to pick an argument here, and I'm going to bow out of this thread now (no more posts from me) but I just wanted to point out that my post at 11:52am was not about what I thought would happen during the rest of the day with the share price of OSL - I really have no idea what the SP will do from day to day or intraday - my post was an attempt to answer the query about whether the pre-market bids at 5.4c and 5.6c were real or fake. They were real, but that didn't mean those bidders were prepared to pay that much in reality necessarily because they were pre-market bids and all bids that were above the opening price would have been settled at the opening price. In this case that opening price was 5.2c. Tomorrow it will likely be different. I imagine they'll probably close lower if it's a "no news from OSL" day tomorrow, but I have no idea where they'll open. The serious players usually buy and sell at the close, not at the open, or so I'm told. Good luck to all who still hold. And goodbye.