Hey mate. The reason you often see very small purchases is...

Hey mate. The reason you often see very small purchases is because they can be used to manipulate selling and/or buying behaviours.

For example. Lets say you are are a shareholder in $ABC. You already own a small parcel of shares, but you want to buy much, much more. You put yourself into the buy queue with an order to buy $100k worth of shares at $1.00.

Let's suppose the buy side is sitting at $1.01 and the sell side is sitting at $1.02. If the current buy and sell side is very thin, you could take your small parcel of shares and SELL them (even though your goal is to buy shares, not sell them). If you manage to wipe out the entire buy side at $1.01, you could then sell just one of your shares for $1.00. Seeing a rapid price swing like this might be enough to either

• a) trigger conditional sell orders, or
• b) generate some fear amongst current shareholders who then panic sell their shares.

Next thing you know, you have managed to buy a massive load of shares at $1.00.

Of course, this will only work a small percentage of the time, but we all know the market is rife with manipulators.

I should point out that doing this may well be illegal and its (obviously) not something I would or have ever done.