Ann: Nearmap successfully completes $70 million capital raising, page-36

"Something the group could help educate me on is the 'Course of Sales'. I'm unable to purchase share packages < $500, why are there often many tiny trades in 'Course of Sales' e.g. 1 or 2 shares per transaction?"

@grjohnson ,

The overwhelming majority of institutional dealing these days is conducted by computers, programmed by various algorithms that execute trades in a variety of different ways.

But the essence of what happens is that an institutional investor will give a broker an instruction to buy or sell a certain amount of stock over the course of the day, at a price no less than VWAP [*].

For example, an insto dealer might call the insto broker with the instruction:
"Please buy 100,000 BHP at VWAP, confined to 5% of ADV [*]". The broker plugs that into his/her computer and the algorithm does the execution of the order per the client's instruction.

That's why you see those small volumes trading at times; it's the computer algorithms doing their thing.


[*]
VWAP =Volume Weighted Average Price
ADV = Average Daily Volume