cn - Low volume trades. It shows activity on the stock. The cost of trading today is mere pennies compared to what it was in years gone by. For a couple of hundred or thousand dollars the market makers, official or otherwise are able to some degree control the price of a companies shares. In some cases they are able to move that price up or down with just a few trades of a few hundred shares. In our case we have about 56 mil shares in the public float of which I believe 20 to 30 mil of those shares are held very tightly(don't trade) so it makes it very easy for a market maker of sorts to move the price of this company by trading very small numbers of shares. When we see the price go up during the day it is not uncommon to see the price come down in the last few minutes on very low volume. This is a product of a very tightly held company and trading costs that have gotten extremely reasonable of the years.

A second reason to see small numbers of shares trade is automated portfolio management. There are a number of brokerages that have these portfolio management programs available that will automatically adjust holding within a predefined portfolio based on preset parameters. Some of these portfolios are adjusted weekly, monthly, quarterly or semiannually. Sometimes the parameters of these programs are set to only trade a specific number of shares at a time when adjustments are being made.

When all the different strategies are playing out throughout the day it looks bazaar but it all serves its own purpose.

All IMO

tada