Notice at close today CPST had a single institutional trade of 99K+ shrs
These "closing blocks" are very common and I've not yet tried to correlate them with follow-on behavior.
{ So that could be a sign your hedges are looking to cover some here...we'll know on Monday whether we can move up and make the 1.36 the support }
99K is relatively small though, in relation what we would look for as some real pressure. I think that's around some kind of "average" size, although I've not run any stats on it.
Here's this month's stuff, which I don't normally tabulate like this.
I was looking at volume on today's up move and decided it's not too shabby - 10-day average is ~2.956MM through Thursday and we got ~2.27MM Friday on this rebound. Not big enough to say "off to the races" but not small enough to say "no strength in the move" either. 'Course Friday's behavior is often odd anyway.
As to being hedgers or institutional activities, I don't know. I've read that day traders, and others, use "at the close" order types for buys and sells. I've read that the high normal volatility and volume in the last two minutes is a common effect of these orders, which start getting executed in the last minute or two IIRC. I'm suspecting that these closing blocks are usually somehow related to these activities. E.g. I suspect a market-maker or the exchange absorbs these orders and then does some kind of "bookkeeping" or transfer related to them. Don't know and likely never will, but that's my suspicion.
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