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Non-Tech : Income Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jwells who wrote (51915)	7/25/2025 10:28:04 AM
From: Elroy	1 Recommendation Recommended By KEN2CWL Respond to of 52048

I occassionally own one share of various stocks that I'm interested in to force me to pay attention to it's price movement. When commissions are zero it's easy. I'll also point that (I think) the broker's generally only show prices where the lot is 100 shares or more. So......if someone puts a 20 share order between the spread, we may not see it, but we'll get 20 shares filled at that level if we pay the offer or hit the bid. Similar thing happens with options. Some options allow us to put in penny limit orders, so if the market is 90 cents at 95 cents, we can put in a limit order to buy at 91 cents. But others may not see our 91 cent bid, at least I don't, I know see prices in nickel increments.

To: jwells who wrote (51915)	7/25/2025 4:13:24 PM
From: Privately	1 Recommendation Recommended By brehm233 Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 52048

Re: Privately, thanks for your response. Yes, I can see my question was not clear. I I agree with Elroy's response. a few other thoughts: There might have been a "stub" left from a bigger lot. I often get a partial fill on a sell order that doesn't take my whole offered volume and I get left with a few shares still for sale. You may have tripped into one of those. Someone sent a sell order for a share to "test" the market. As Elroy pointed out, we mere mortals can't always see all the orders that are out there. I learned from Gridbird (who hasn't been seen on this board in a while) to send tiny orders to see where the market is really at. Sometimes you can get fills on tiny orders at better prices than larger orders - although a penny or two is rarely worth the trouble. Lots of trading is handled by bots nowadays and they sometimes do strange things - like buying and selling in odd lots. Not sure what their strategy is, but sometimes they will react to tiny orders (like I mentioned above) with weird responses (like selling a single share). You can get real time and sales data from a number of sources (for free) to see what trading lots are actually transacting. For example, I often use free real time's tool at quotes.freerealtime.com (that link is to data on SOCGP - just change the address to put in the ticker you want. You can navigate to a page through their site where you can put in a ticker, but its a bunch of clicks). Also note that they use the ".P" nomenclature for preferred stocks, so MS-E or MS/PRE shows on their site as MS.PE, or quotes.freerealtime.com ("https://quotes.freerealtime.com/quotes/MS.PE/Time%26Sales")