All those small trades are the dreaded bots. It's classic algorithmic trading done by one or two of the big brokers and their trading bot computers. Usual culprits are Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Bear Bros, Lehmann Bros, and a few others.
It can certainly affect the price short term, but it's a sure sign that they want IN. A good sign.
They will keep walking the price down with those tiny trades (one computer buys the shares from the other, and being brokers, there's no brokerage to pay) for a zero sum game. But as the price goes down, and other people sell, then the buy-side computer starts to snap up all those shares cheaply until the price bounces back up again. Then they will do the same again ad nauseam.
The course of sales data is what gives it away as programmed bot trading.
As it's not a level playing field, therefore, all we can do is note it happening, and either just sit back and wait for them to finish, after which the price will rally back up, or else take advantage of the situation and use the bot-induced dips to piggyback a few buy orders to top up. Have done that myself on several occasions with various stocks.
This used to happen a lot with PDN a few months ago. Hope AGS ends up where PDN is now..... ;)
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