28. Swabeng Discussion: Lots and Lots (Board and Odd)

Whenever you trade a stock, have you noticed the amount of shares needed for you to buy or sell a stock? While you may buy a stock on a per share basis, there is a standardized way of trading them.

For starters, a board lot is defined as a standardized number of shares for a specific price range. This facilitates easier trading.

Let us refer to the table below.

Lets say you're interested to invest in Jollibee (Stock Code: JFC) on May 10, 2017 and you want to buy 100 shares. You need to check the price range for the stock. Upon checking you noticed that it costs 211.00 pesos (at the close). From there, when you checked on the table it is within the 200 to 499.8 peso range which means that the minimum number of shares for JFC would be 10 shares or equivalent to 1 board lot. Since you will be buying 100 shares of JFC, this means that you'll be buying 10 board lots of JFC.

Now, lets say someone gave you 4 shares of PLDT (Stock Code: TEL) and you wanted to sell them since you have already profited from it. Upon checking on the board, the number of your shares is not listed, hence you have to sell them via Odd Lot hoping that there are buyers out there who can match the number of shares and the price that you intend to sell the stock. Anyway, these are very seldom cases when you got to hold a stock that is an Odd Lot.


Till the next topic.