FACT...REALLY. Please show me the facts.
Heres an educated opinion on where T trades originate:
Trying to decipher the meaning of these trades with the limited information that is available on the subject led down several dark paths. Clearly, the average investor is not meant to understand the concept or its rules. Even more disconcerting is the second part of the SEC message “Recent amendments to FINRA rules will expand the types of situations in which Form T is to be used, but they are not yet in effect.” That means there is even less transparency about this mysterious T Trade.
After months of due diligence, there are a few poorly publicized uses for a T Trade. The most important factor here is that the only requirement of market makers by FINRA is that they must report all trades in a day. They are not required to do so when the actual trade occurs.
To avoid creating “an unbalanced market”, market makers often do not report certain trades during the day to the public and then use a T Trade not to “scare” investors into thinking a market for that stock is going in one direction or the other at the spurring of one large investor.
If a market maker wants to accumulate a large amount of a stock in one trading day, that market maker may actually not report any of the trades that occurred until the trading day has ended so as not to alert the market to the collection. This practice is completely legal under the FINRA rules of the OTC Markets so long as the trade is reported at the end of the day.
To execute a Market on Close” order, a market maker may have an order to purchase the stock at a certain price at the end of the trading day. This is the most unlikely scenario because it needs to be assured that someone selling the stock and someone buying that stock are agreeing upon a price. Simply put, this is more likely with insider buying and selling.
The T Trade that the public sees is nothing more than one or all of the above scenarios. The T Trade reported at the end of the day can be from one market maker or many involved market makers. It can be a single purchase price but is usually an average of all of the previously unreported purchases from that business day.
