beaner and any others that may be confused about the pre...

beaner and any others that may be confused about the pre auction, it is purely an opportunity to ensure you either buy or sell the shares at best price.

If for instance you have a likely rapidly rising SP with the previous close at 50c and the pre open initially showing buyers ranging from 50c through to 60c you could put a buy order in at $1.  It does not necessarily mean you are prepared to pay that amount all it means is that you would be first of the rank at whatever the algorithm works out at.  In the same way if you wanted to sell at that auction price in order to ensure you got the algorithm setting you may put your sell at 20c.
A  example of the Algorithm setting as per PLS at 16.04

	Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 4	Column 5	Column 6	Column 7	Column 8	Column 9
0	Buyers					Sellers
1	No.	Quantity	Price		#	Price	Quantity	No.
2	1	35005	0.685	35005	1	0.58	250000	1	250000
3	1	50000	0.68	85005	2	0.595	55000	2	305000
4	4	39232	0.67	124237	3	0.6	55000	2	360000
5	3	141532	0.66	265769	4	0.61	78571	4	438571
6	5	52015	0.655	317784	5	0.615	218094	2	656665
7	2	214600	0.65	532384	6	0.625	4586	1	661251
8	2	14761	0.645	547145	7	0.635	286000	5	947251
9	2	107999	0.64	655144	8	0.64	1023626	19	1970877
10	3	33800	0.635	688944	9	0.645	467243	10	2438120
11	10	306087	0.63	995031	10	0.65	980466	30	3418586

The idea is to sum the buys and sells downward, in the above you will see that the sum of buyers to 63.5c equals 688,944 and a total of sellers prepared to accept no less than 63.5c of 947,251 this is the closing price.  The allocation of sales starts from the top and as you can see although the seller placed a sale at .58c he is the first to get that closing price.  As an exercise tomorrow copy the pre opening bids into an excel sheet and see if you can work out the opening price.