What are the scenarios if mining company around 4c decides to halt stock trading due to capital raising?
"It appears that the company in question is raising money to invest in expanding its operations (specifically lithium production but that is off topic for here). The stock price was rising on the back of (perceived) increases in demand for the company's products but in order to fulfil demand they need to either invest in higher production or increase prices. They chose to increase production by investing. To invest they needed to raise capital and so are going through the motions to do that. The key question as to what will happen with their stock price after this is broken down into two parts: short term and long term: In the short term the price is driven by the expectation of future profits (see below) and the behavioural expectations from an increase in interest in the stock caused by the fact that it is in the news. People who had never heard of the stock or thought of investing in the company have suddenly discovered it and been told that it is doing well and so ""want a piece of it"". This will exacerbate the effect of the news (broadly positive or negative) and will drive the price in the short run. The effect of extra leverage (assuming that they raise capital by writing bonds) also immediately increases the total value of the company so will increase the price somewhat. The short term price changes usually pare back after a few months as the shine goes off and people take profits. For investing in the long run you need to consider how the increase in capital will be used and how demand and supply will change. Since the company is using the money to invest in factors of production (i.e. making more product) it is the return on capital (or investment) employed (ROCE) that will inform the fundamentals underlying the stock price. The higher the ROCE, the more valuable the capital raised is in the future and the more profits and the company as a whole will grow. A questing to ask yourself is whether they can employ the extra capital at the same ROCE as they currently produce. It is possible that by investing in new, more productive equipment they can raise their ROCE but also possible that, because the lithium mines (or whatever) can only get so big and can only get so much access to the seams extra capital will not be as productive as existing capital so ROCE will fall for the new capital."
In Canada, it is similarly taxed as CQM states. Mining is considered business income and you need to file a T1 form. Capital appreciation is no different than treating gains from stock. A lot can happen to a stock's price in 1 hour and especially 30 days.  Not allowing investors to back out of if they desire would be a bad idea.  These HFT firms operate on milliseconds.  Requiring investors to hold for even just 1-5 seconds would be a major blow to the industry. "No one is quite sure what happened (yet).  Speculation includes: The interesting thing is that Procter & Gamble stock got hammered, as did Accenture.  Both of which are fairly stable companies, that didn't make any major announcements, and aren't really connected to the current financial instability in Greece.  So, there is no reason for there stock prices to have gone crazy like that.  This points to some kind of screw up, and not a regular market force. Apparently, the trades involved in this event are going to be canceled. Edit #1: One thing that can contribute to an event like this is automatic selling triggered by stop loss orders.  Say someone at Citi makes a mistake and sells too much of a stock.  That drives the stock price below a certain threshold.  Computers that were pre-programmed to sell at that point start doing their job.  Now the price goes even lower.  More stop-loss orders get triggered.  Things start to snowball.  Since it's all done by computer these days something like this can happen in seconds.  All the humans are left scratching their heads. (No idea if that's what actually happened.) Edit #2: IEEE Spectrum has a pretty concise article on the topic.  It also includes some links to follow. Edit #3 (05/14/2010): Reuters is now reporting that a trader at Waddell & Reed triggered all of this, but not through any wrongdoing. Edit #4 (05/18/2010): Waddell & Reed claims they didn't do it.  The House Financial Services Subcommittee investigated, but they couldn't find a ""smoking gun"".  I think at this point, people have pretty much given up trying to figure out what happened. Edit #5 (07/14/2010): The SEC still has no idea.  I'm giving up. :-)" "In a way yes but I doubt you'd want that. A ""Stop-Limit"" order has both stop and limit components to it but I doubt this gives you what you want. In your example, if the stock falls to $1/share then the limit order of $3/share would be triggered but this isn't quite what I'd think you'd want to see. I'd suggest considering having 2 orders: A stop order to limit losses and a limit order to sell that are separate rather than fusing them together that likely isn't going to work." "EDIT: It was System Disruption or Malfunctions August 24, 2015 2:12 PM EDT   Pursuant to Rule 11890(b) NASDAQ, on its own motion, in conjunction   with BATS, and FINRA has determined to cancel all trades in security   Blackrock Capital Investment. (Nasdaq: BKCC) at or below $5.86 that   were executed in NASDAQ between 09:38:00 and 09:46:00 ET. This   decision cannot be appealed. NASDAQ will be canceling trades on the   participants behalf. A person on Reddit claimed that he was the buyer. He used Robinhood, a $0 commission broker and start-up.  The canceled trades are reflected on CTA/UTP and the current charts will differ from the one posted below.  It is an undesired effect of the 5-minute Trading Halt.  It is not ""within 1 hour of opening, BKCC traded between $0.97 and $9.5"".  Those trades only occurred for a few seconds on two occasions.  One possible reason is that when the trading halt ended, there was a lot of Market Order to sell accumulated.  Refer to the following chart, where each candle represents a 10 second period. As you can see, the low prices did not ""sustain"" for hours.   And the published halts." The obvious thing would happen. 10 shares change owner at the price of $100. A partially still open selling order would remain. Market orders without limits means to buy or sell at the best possible or current price. However, this is not very realistic. Usually there is a spread between the bid and the ask price and the reason is that market makers are acting in between. They would immediately exploit this situation, for example, by placing appropriately limited orders. Orders without limits are not advisable for stocks with low trading activity. Would you buy or sell stuff without caring for the price? "Some history: In the US, this is very tightly controlled and regulated. Although stock market securities insider trading is a relatively new crime around the world (20-30 year old), the United States  is exceptional for offering the longest sentences for it, although it is still far more lucrative than and carries lower sentences than something like petty larceny. The perception of illegal insider trading has changed in the US over the years, although it is based on much older fraud statutes the regulators and the courts have only really developed modern case law against insider trading in the past 20-30 years. The US relies on its vast network of registered broker-dealers to detect and report abnormal trading activity and the regulator (SEC) can quickly obtain emergency court orders from rent-a-judges (Administrative Law Judges) to freeze trader's assets to prevent them from withdrawing, or quickly enacting sanctions. So this reality helps deter trading on material inside information. So for someone that needs to get an information advantage on the market, it is [simply] necessary for them to rationalize how this information could be inferred from public sources.  Similarly there is a thin line between non-public information and public information, the ""lab experiment"" example would be material insider information, but the fact that there will be litigation over a company's key patents may be ""public"" as soon as the lawyer submits the complaint to the court system. It is also worth noting that there are A LOT of financial products trading in the capital markets, and illegal insider trading laws only applies to trading of shares of a company. So if a major holder in gold is about to liquidate all their holdings, being short gold futures is not subject to civil and criminal sanctions. Hope this helps. The above examples should help you understand what kind of information is material inside information and what kind is not, and how it is relevant to trading decisions." It looks more like someone is trying to pocket the spread.  The trades are going off at the bid then the ask (from what I can tell without any L1 and L2 data, but the spread could be bigger than what the prices show, since the stock looks pretty volatile given the difference between current price and VWAP...).  Looking through the JSE rule books I didn't find any special provisions on how they handle odd lots in their Central Order Book, but the usual practice in other markets is to display only round lot orders. So these 4 share orders would remain hidden from book participants and could be set there to trigger executions from those who are probing for limit orders. Or to make a market with very limited risk. Value is the key word here. Traders should ideally trade on the perceived future value of a company.  Changes in the perceived future value is what leads them to buy and sell shares. That said, if a company were to have some catastrophe happen (say it and all of its employees and property disappeared)  and somehow every shareholder agreed to not sell, the companies market capitalization would remain unmoved even though the value of the company is gone. So theoretically yes, but it is unlikely. Day traders see a dip, buy stocks, then sell them 4 mins later when the value climbed to a small peak. What value is created? Is the company better off from that trade? The stocks were already outside of company hands, so the trade doesn't affect them at all. You've just received money from others for no contribution to society. A common scenario is a younger business having a great idea but not enough capital funds to actually get the business going. So, investors buy shares which they can sell later on at a higher value. The investor gets value from the shares increasing over time, but the business also gets value of receiving money to build the business. "That amount of shares is too low to create ""ripples"" in the market. Usually you don't specify the price to sell the stock, unless you are personally on the floor trading the securities. And even then, with a volume of $50,000 it would just mean you threw away $45,000. For most people it would mean setting a $5 sell order, and the broker would understand that as ""sell this security so long the price is above $5"". When you get to the trading volume required to influence the price, usually you are also bound by some regulations banning some moves. One of them is the Pump and Dump, and even if you are suggesting the opposite, it might be in preparation of this scam. Also, the software used for High Frequency Trading (what all the cool kids[a] in Wall Street are using these days) employ advanced (and proprietary) heuristics to analyze the market and make thousands of trades in a short interval of time. On HTF's speed: Decisions happen in milliseconds, and this could result in big market moves without reason.  So a human trader attempting to manipulate the market versus these HTF setups, would be like a kid in a tricile attempting to outrun the Flash (DC comics). [a] Cool Kid: not really kids, more like suited up sharks. Money-eating sharks." (yes, this should probably be a comment, not an answer ... but it's a bit long). I don't know what the laws are specifically about this, but my grandfather used to be on the board of a company that he helped to found ... and back in the 1980s, there was a period when the stock price suddenly quadrupled One of the officers in the company, knowing that the stock was over-valued, sold around a third of his shares ... and he got investigated for insider trading.  I don't recall if he was ever charged with anything, but there were some false rumors spreading about the company at the time (one was that they had something that you could sprinkle on meat to reduce the cholesterol).  I don't know where the rumors came from, but I've always assumed it was some sort of pump-and-dump stock manipulation, as this was decades before they were on the S&P 500 small cap. After that, the company had a policy where officers had to announce they were selling stock, and that it wouldn't execute for some time (1? 2 weeks? something like that).  I don't know if that was the SEC's doing, or something that the company came up with on their own. Out of curiosity I went through a couple of prospectuses and all contained various clauses for the event where LIBOR is not published although the language suggests more of anticipation of brief technical difficulties. Some are rather vague and prone to manipulation. "You are comparing ""market caps"" and ""enterprise value"".  If the company has four billion dollars cash in the bank, then the value would be four billion plus whatever the business itself is worth as a business. If the business itself is only worth 400 million, then you would have 4.4bn market caps and 400 million enterprise value. The ""enterprise value"" is basically how much the business would be worth if it had no cash or no debt.  These numbers would be a very unusual situation. It could happen for example if a big company has sold 90% of its business for cash. When you buy a share of the company, you get a tiny share of the business and you own a tiny share of the cash. This stock will very likely keep its value, but won't make much money.  On the other hand, more common would be a company where the business is worth 4bn, but the company has also 4bn debt. So it is worth exactly zero. Market caps close to zero, but enterprise value $4bn, because you ignore the debt in the enterprise value.  Edit: Sorry, got the ""enterprise value"" totally wrong, read millions instead of billions: Your numbers would mean that you have a huge, huge company with close to 440bn debt. Most likely someone made a mistake here. A ""normal"" situation would be say a company with a business that is worth $500 million, but they have $100 million debt, so market caps = $400 million but enterprise value = $500 million.  PS. Yahoo has the same nonsense numbers on their UK site, and for other companies (I just checked Marks and Spencer's which apparently has an enterprise value of 800 billion pound with a totally ridiculous P/E ratio." If you aren't familiar with Norbert's Gambit, it's worth looking at. This is a mechanism using a Canadian brokerage account to simultaneously execute one stock trade in CAD and one in USD. The link I provided claims that it only starts potentially making sense somewhere in the 10,000+ range.