Another key factor to be aware of when viewing course of sales...

Another key factor to be aware of when viewing course of sales is the increase in the use of automated trading, which has changed the trading landscape over the last three years

Increasingly, course of sales is filled with small volume executions that look unusual. These are signs of automated trading or what is referred to as algorithmic trading. Essentially, this is an automated order manager which has instructions to feed the order into the market gradually throughout the day. In the past, brokers would manually enter orders to market. With automated trading, preset order details can be used to ensure large orders are managed effectively throughout the trading day without causing large price movements to the disadvantage of clients to get a good price for their client or trade within the trading range of the stock for the day. Now with the use of automated orders, brokers can preset their instructions and the order manager does the rest.