7/3/14 The last few days the data for $IKNX has been screwy. Yesterday the total volume was off by 30% almost the whole day and 25% at COB between Nasdaq.com/Bloomberg business .com and my brokerage house. Today IKNX gained .25 or .91% on only 100 shares. My P/L for the day on IKNX was negative. How could that be? At COB there was an enormous spread, something like 14 x 26 or something like that. I called customer service and this is what they told me: When a stock is thinly traded, the brokerage firm has an algorithm that weighs that B/A against a daily trade volume and on that, assigns you a market value pps. This is the number used to calculate the total market value of that contract in your account. Personally, I find it stunning that my broker can arbitrarily determine the value of any stock, of course this is at least as far as for internal records go. In the end, market will prevail. But....
And the part that really interests me is this: I also asked the broker yesterday why there was such a significant difference between the volume I saw in other places in the internet and that which was being shown to me on my platform (25-30% less). They told me that the volume feed I was receiving came from a consolidated electronic market, AND that it included all the trades from those exchanges BUT that it did not include the totalvolume of trades made at that point in the day and that it was tallied and reported at day's end. (Late reported trades? Combos?) So. My guess is that this stock is actually trading much more in the dark pools than we know? Did you know that "Volume" doesn't really mean the same thing everywhere in public market and that you can have your volume reported to you in different ways, what on what it includes or excludes, "Native volume" or "calculated volume". They can be very different numbers.
This has been an excellent education for me. Until this week, if I found a B/A on a site, like here, that was different than the one my broker was showing me, I thought that the highest volume one would be the most accurate. That's not correct. Timestamp, yes, but volume, no.
In addition, since this bizarre volume and the wild swings of pps only began July 01, I will also add a guess that Mr. Nerges is accumulating, since he has not bought since May that we know of AND that it might also be the inclusion of IKNX in the Russel, which needs to rebalance on the quarters, right?
I am writing this post because I have an interest in this company, and if some freaky numbers keep buyers away, or confuse people, I want them to know my experience
