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Hi,

Can anyone tell me why someone would want to do this? Attached image shows a few trades that went through between 16:16 and 16:20.

It looks pretty clear that it's the same person doing it. They even split the amount of shares bought into "non round numbers" for a while.

446+1054=1500
1946+3054 = 5000
1446+1554 = 3000

Then a bunch of batches of 10,000 at a time.

And all of these went through at R14.50 ...

Why not just buy them all at once? What is the benefit of doing this?

Thanks!

Big buy orders can significantly move the market price if they are executed all at once as there often isn't enough shares on offer (people selling their shares) at the price they want, so they break up the purchases in "chunks". With this they also try to hide the large purchase of shares (although as you can see you can't perfectly hide it) so that traders and the like don't front run their share purchases, also effectively increasing the buying price of the shares.

Looks like an 'iceberg' seller at a limit price.... Basically when you have a large position to get away but you only show small volume on the offer. Each time it transacts the volume is refreshed which is where the large 10k orders started coming from. A more intelligent iceberg would have been to shift price up X% on each fill but clearly seller was working a level which he needed to get done. Most probably the buyer was fishing to see where the iceberg volume ended because there would probably have been a gap above the offer price which s/he could have pushed the price into i.e. make a new market around the gap.