MidtownGuy wrote: I wouldn't have thought so either, fdfd12, but I tested it recently on a buy I wanted to make, and instead traded a long series of odd lot trades into the ask against an algorithm pulling the price down, and I did indeed move the price back up every time the algo moved it down.
There's been a huge shift in the past few years to odd-lots, because of technology and slicing of orders by algorithms, as nearly half of all trades on some exchanges are odd lots (also because of the escalating prices of figurehead stocks like TSLA and APPL, people can only buy odd lots like 1 share of Amazon or 5 shares of TSLA).
In fact it used to be that odd-lot quotes weren't even shown on public data feeds, but you can clearly now see small odd lots trades go through.
Maybe it's an allowance for retail traders only, as trading houses I think are still obligated to execute trades at the best price posted on an exchange, with those prices only by round-lot quotes.
Regardless, I did indeed test it out for half a day recently and it was quite surprising to me also.
Maybe others here have similar or contrary experiences. Another fun thing to examine.
fdfd12 wrote: Odd lots (less than 100 shares) do NOT move the price.
You can have a bid of $3.70 and an ask at $3.75 with the last price at $3.75.
10 shares market will NOT move the stocks price from $3.75 to $3.70.
The price will remain at $3.75.
MidtownGuy wrote: Sadly any trade made at the bid price rather than the ask price adjusts the overall price down to that sale price. And it can be done with a trade of 1 share. But traders usually use blocks of 100 share so that they can argue they weren't trying to adjust the price intentionally... and because the system is structured around 100 share blocks which get filled faster than odd numbers and can thus assure the planned price movement.
wallyman wrote: Looking at the chart pjecan posted--Can somebody please explain to me how a 5 share trade can send a stock down a penny? I know being able to trade commission free has led to a lot of this happening but do not understand how such a small trade can do that to the price in either direction.