sudden sell down, page-13

All those 1 and 4 share trades - in fact all the small number trades - are the signatures of algorithmic trades. The "bots". They use multiple tiny trades for two purposes, even though the original intent was a single purpose - to trickle shares out steadily over a period of time in order not to move the price. But some (?many ?most) instos now use those bots to do exactly the opposite - you can see it happening in the Course of Sales real-time data. It has been discussed many times here on HC and elsewhere.

If you check that Course of Sales, you'll see that a 'B' trade - that is, one initiated by a "Buy" - is almost immediately followed by one or more of those tiny trades walking the price back down a tick at a time. In the case of PDN that is in half-cent steps, with some using the cross-matching 0.2 or 0.7 trades to do it. It's done to try to get other bots "sucked in" and take the price even further down, thus making the shorting a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of course, the same technique can be used in the other direction on the pump part of the cycle, to take the price up.

This can only be done by brokers or big institutions (eg banks) who have DMA (Direct Market Access) to the ASX computers, and of course they don't have to pay themselves brokerage. And they pay the ASX just the total commission on the overall number of shares traded for the day.

The other thing that gets up my (and other peoples') nose is that many of these trades are crossing trades, with the trade occurring between two computers from the same broker/fund/insto. Allegedly between different entities using the same broker, eg different clients, but we all know what really happens...

So that's the explanation of all those tiny trades - it's the signature of the bots, and you can watch them in action on that real-time Course of Sales. And watch them battle it out to achieve the closing price for the day during the 10-minute closing auction - it's a joke!