The way to look at this data is first, look at the columns 'net...

The way to look at this data is first, look at the columns 'net volume' and 'net value'. That gives you an idea of number of shares and value of shares each broker has cleared in net terms. Buy-sell = net for each.

Then you look at the broker itself to get a sense for retail vs wholesale buying.

That's it. It doesn't offer much more unless you regularly look run broker data, check single days, check date ranges etc etc to spot patterns.

In the case above, I just checked the one day because I knew there were a couple of unusual transactions and I wanted to see which brokers they were cleared through.

To understand retail vs wholesale buying or selling, typically the brokers with a higher proportion of retail investors are Commonwealth (Commsec), Open Markets (Selfwealth, Superhero, IRESS), AIEX (Westpac, Netwealth), Wealthhub (NAB, MLC, JB Were), CMC Markets (ANZ, Bendigo, St George, Suncorp, BoQ). The names in brackets are the trading platforms.

In the middle would be Third Party (HSBC retail, BellDirect Retail), Macquarie Retail, IG Markets, IBA.

The rest, generally, would wholesale.

The totals at the bottom will always always even out. It just tells you what's been cleared by each broker on behalf of the trading platform. Broker data will not tell you if buyers are in control or sellers.

The data I posted above only shows the trades on that day. If I ran a date range scan, you would see more activity, more brokers etc.

Sometimes you'll see 'Unassigned transactions' as a line item. These are transactions yet to be settled and assigned to the relevant broker, noting that trades are T+2. So if you see broker data posted that has a lot of unassigned transactions, it should be taken with caution. Ask the person to re-run that same scan on the same parameters three days later and you'll see who it cleared with.

All of the above my opinion and interpretation only!