"Something the group could help educate me on is the 'Course of...

"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