Why do I see multiple trades of very small quantities?
"Or it could be a Robinhood user just messing around with their free commissions. I've seen ""people that work for organizations"" and other analysts go crazy over some completely benign activity. It is like playing poker with a newbie, unpredictable." Probing for hidden limit orders usually involves sending the orders and then cancelling them before they get filled if they don't get filled. With trades actually going through multiple times for small amounts it looks more like a VWAP strategy where the trader is feeding small volumes into the market as part of a larger trade trying to minimize average cost. It could be probing but without seeing the orders and any cancels it would be difficult to tell. edit: I just had another thought; it could possibly be a market maker unwinding a bad position caused by other trading. Sometimes they drip trades into the market to prevent themselves from hitting big orders etc. that might move back against them. This is probably not right but is just another thought. source: I work for an organization that provides monitoring for these things to many large trading organizations. It looks more like someone is trying to pocket the spread.  The trades are going off at the bid then the ask (from what I can tell without any L1 and L2 data, but the spread could be bigger than what the prices show, since the stock looks pretty volatile given the difference between current price and VWAP...).  Looking through the JSE rule books I didn't find any special provisions on how they handle odd lots in their Central Order Book, but the usual practice in other markets is to display only round lot orders. So these 4 share orders would remain hidden from book participants and could be set there to trigger executions from those who are probing for limit orders. Or to make a market with very limited risk.
I admit, in the long term there are a good number of kinks to work out, but in the end I want to see some system where people in general can seize the means to their own well being without stepping on one another.  The management corruptions you talked about is another reason why I prefer Worker-Co-ops to be the optimum form of issuing business, because its not just a few people in charge, it's a whole social group acting in unison.    When you discuss the mom-and-pop store having no suppliers, it would be good to promote some way of each money supply to have a share of each industry within it.  There are always some people in every trade looking for their next job.  They just have to find a supply where there trade is in demand.  The process is self feeding.  Next off, or course the mechanism of the system would work in a way that firm's can't just pay themselves with their own debt, they have to issue it to their creditors first, and even then it's practically impossible to accept your own debt as payment.  You would have to take some from a competitor at best.    What I've been trying to do is find some system where no one institution or no one alliance holds the keys to the definition of value.  If you have five to eight dictators fighting at once as opposed to one financial dictator who can oversee all, like the fed scenario you just described, It's more possible for people who are freer relatively to survive freely between the borders of these spheres of influence, as they can play each dictator off the other.  at least from your dialogue I can see you're one of those who gets what I'm trying to aim for.    Here's another idea I've explored with it, that's similar but may make the environment slightly different, so let me know what you think  what I call the Revolving Tax Window, where the government accepts different bondnotes, both in quantity and specific assortments of notes, in intervals of every business quarter, so that the demand for specific notes changes four times a year.  From January until the end of March they could accept Taxes in notes from Firms A,F,H, and T, and for April into June it could be just B and S, and so on.  The options for note issuing could be set on a list of firms registered with the SEC or whoever.   The combination for the quarter could be picked at random by a randomizing algorithm, so no firm could make a plan to be a market dictator, and a sense of dynamism is maintained in the economy.    Obviously, the more firms are properly registered on this list, the more combinations of monetary combinations you have, and the more power is distributed from too much control by anybody.    What you can do is choose whether or not you want there to be less or more notes in the next quarter, because just like fiscal policy and conventional monetary policy, the extremes have trade offs, but different ones; to few currencies, the economy may be stimulated, but you get market dictators via monetary oligopoly, even if temporary.  Too many, you avoid market dictators who will be more focused on getting a real return by investing in competing ventures based on what will actually return investment, but the economy may not be as stimulated.  What do you think of this structural alternative?  (One of the focal sources I've been building my economic policy on has been *Debt: The First 5,000 Years* by David Graeber, if anyone's familiar.) "Small businesses are often governed by local regulations and state law. In a low liability small quantity arena, you should be able to get away with a DBA (doing business as) arrangement, such as DBA ""Jay's Gem's"". A small business license may come with a state Tax ID and satisfy your supplier, but a Federal EIN can be obtained from the IRS, and may be necessary to apply for the business license. It wouldn't hurt to talk to the local chamber of commerce or state small business agencies if you have questions about local requirements." "I found an answer by Peter Selinger, in two articles, Tutorial on multiple currency accounting (June 2005, Jan 2011) and the accompanying Multiple currency accounting in GnuCash (June 2005, Feb 2007). Selinger embraces the currency neutrality I'm after. His method uses ""[a]n account that is denominated as a difference of multiple currencies... known as a currency trading account."" Currency trading accounts show the gain or loss based on exchange rates at any moment.  Apparently GnuCash 2.3.9 added support for multi-currency accounting. I haven't tried this myself. This feature is not enabled by default, and must be turned on explicity. To do so, check ""Use Trading Accounts"" under File -> Properties -> Accounts. This must be done on a per-file basis. Thanks to Mike Alexander, who implemented this feature in 2007, and worked for over 3 years to convince the GnuCash developers to include it. Older versions of GnuCash, such as 1.8.11, apparently had a feature called ""Currency Trading Accounts"", but they behaved differently than Selinger's method." "I don't know really is the best investment strategy. People think that they have to know everything to make money. But realistically, out of the hundreds of thousands of publicly traded securities, you really can only invest in a tiny number of them. Of the course of a week, you literally have more than a million ""buy"" or ""don't buy"" decisions, because the prices of those securities fluctuate every day.  Simply due to the fact that there are so many securities, you cannot know what everything is going to do. You have to say ""I don't know"". Also, when you do understand something, it is usually fairly priced. So will you make money on it? ""I don't know"". Only very rarely will you find something that you actually understand well and it is significantly undervalued. You can be looking at a company a day for two years before you find it. But people get trigger happy. They bet on 51%/49% odds when they should only bet on 90%/10% odds or higher.  If you are forced to bet on everything, it makes sense that you bet on everything you believe is greater than 50% chance of winning. But since you cannot bet on everything, you should only bet on the highest quality bets, those with greater than 90% chance of winning. To find such a bet, you may have to shuffle through 100 different companies and only make 2-3 bets. You are looking for something that is at least 2 standard deviations away from the mean.  People are not good at doing a lot of work, most of which yields nothing, to find one big payoff. They are wired to only look at the present, so they take the best bet they can see at the moment, which is often barely above 50% (and with any misjudgment, it may actually be well below 50%). And people are not good at understanding compound/geometric growth. You can keep multipling 10% gains (1.10 * 1.10 * 1.10 ...), but that can all be wiped out by multiplying by one zero, which is why taking a 51%/49% bet is so dangerous (even though technically it is an advantageous one). They forget to adjust for the geometric aspect of compounding. A 99%/1% bet is one you should take, but if you are allowed to repeat it and you keep going all-in, you will eventually lose and have $0, which is the same as if you took a single all-in bet that has 0% chance of winning.  As Buffett says, if you are only allowed to make 20 investments over a lifetime, you will most likely do better because it prevents you from making many of these mistakes." There are several reasons why this may happen and I will update as I get more information from you. Volumes on that stock look low (supposing that they are either in a factor between 1s and 1000s) so it could well be that there was no volume on that day. If no trades occur then open, high and low are meaningless as they are statistics based on trades that occur that day and no trades occur. Remember that there has to be volume to get a price. The stock may have been frozen by either the exchange or the company for the day. This could be for various reasons including to prevent some illegal activity. In that case no trades were made because the market for that stock was closed. Another possibility is that all trades that day were cancelled by the exchange. The exchange may cancel all trades if there is unusual, potentially fraudulent or other illegal activity on the stock. In this case the last price for that day existed but was rolled back by the exchange and never occurred. This is a rare situation. Although I can't find any holidays on that date it is possible that this is how your data provider marks market holidays. It would be valid to ignore the data in that case as being from a non-market day. I cannot tell if this is possible without knowing exchange information. There is a possibility that some data providers don't receive data for a day or that it gets corrupted. It may be worth checking another source to ensure the integrity of the data that you are receiving. Whichever reason is true, the data provider has made the close equal to the previous day's close as no price movements occurred. Strictly the closing price is the price of the last trade made for that day and so should be null (and open, high and low should be null too and not 0 otherwise the price change on day is very large!). Therefore, to keep integrity, you have a few choices: There are lots of good answers on here already.  There are actually lots of answers for this question.  Lots.  I have years of experience on the exchange feed side and there are hundreds and thousands of variables.   All of these variables are funneled into systems owned by large financial institutions (I used to manage these - and only a few companies in the world do this so not hard to guess who I work for).  Their computers then make trades based on all of these variables and equations.  There are variables as whacky as how many times was a company mentioned in an aggregate news feed down to your basic company financials.  But if there is a way to measure a company (or to just guess) there is an equation for it plugged into a super computer at a big bank. Now there are two important factors on why you see this mad dash in the morning: Now most of the rest of the day is also automated trades but by the time you are an hour into market open the computers for the most part have fulfilled their calendar buys.  Everyone else's answer is right too.  There is futures contracts that change, global exchange info changes, options expiring, basic news, whatever but all of these are amplified by the calendar day changing. If the share is listed on a stock exchange that creates liquidity and orderly sales with specialist market makers, such as the NYSE, there will always be a counterparty to trade with, though they will let the price rise or fall to meet other open interest.  On other exchanges, or in closely held or private equity scenarios, this is not necessarily the case (NASDAQ has market maker firms that maintain the bid-ask spread and can do the same thing with their own inventory as the specialists, but are not required to by the brokerage rules as the NYSE brokers are).  The NYSE has listing requirements of at least 1.1 million shares, so there will not be a case with only 100 shares on this exchange. While a lot of trading is executed by computers, a substantial amount is still done at the behest of humans.  Brokers managing accounts, Portfolio Managers, and Managers of Mutual Funds doing stock picks etc.  Those folks are still initiating a very large number of the trades (or at least one side of a trade).  And those humans don't work 7 days a week. it's not just computers talking to computers at the behest of other computers.  And even a lot of places that use computers to create models and such, there are still humans in the loop to ensure that the computers are not ordering something stupid to be done. I personally worked for a firm that managed nearly $20Billion in stock portfolios.  The portfolios were designed to track indexes, or a mix of indexes and actively managed funds, but with the addition of managing for tax efficiency.  A lot of complex math and complicated 'solver' programs that figured out each day what if anything to trade in each portfolio.  Despite all those computers, humans still reviewed all the trades to be sure they made sense. And those humans only worked 5 days a week.