Odd-lot Players

Remember those good old days when shares were traded in lots of 1000 shares? Well, time then was tough indeed, especially when you had to put up RM50,000 for just one lot of OCBC shares. When the market fell, you immediately lost 90% of it! There were all kinds of street talk those days of people jumping off tall buildings in the center of KL.

Today, shares are traded at 100 shares-lot for those counters more than a ringgit. For those below a ringgit, you will have to buy them off their lot value of 1000 shares. Anyway, these are a dime a dozen on the Bursa.

If you analyze the shares which are the market movers, their actual values have weathered the sub-prime pretty well. Dividends are still being paid and they do not willy-nilly seek rights and warrants. Just look at IOI, Tanjong, Public Bank, London Pacific Insurance,British American Tobacco, Nestle and Ajinomoto and you would know what I mean.

As these shares continue to be premium-priced, what could one do to partake of some of the action? Well, you would want to perhaps get some small offerings of dividends or even get some trinkets at their Annual General Meetings.

So, what do you do? You buy units of these shares. For example, you can buy 10 units of the shares. Let us look at Sime Darby. It is RM7.00 today but the odd-lot trading is priced differently. You can have sellers selling 99 units at RM8.00 and buyers bargaining at RM5.50 for 10 units. If the seller is desperate, he will sell down,bargaining perhaps to sell at the market price of RM7.00. By the end of the day, he may just take the buyers's quote for only 10 shares and still have 89 more on the block!

Once you have procured your 10 units of odd shares, you generally cannot really trade them at a profit because trading charges at much higher. So you keep the shares and wait to collect dividends (if there are any)and also trinkets at the AGMs.

For example, you may get a few ringgit as dividend for Sime Darby shares or a night free stay at Genting Awana if you have Resorts World or Genting shares. Also when you attend AGMs, you are given a nice morning breakfast and a good packed lunch to take home too!

So, for a few hundred ringgits, you can still play the 'odd lot' game,spent time in some nice hotels and particularly making yourself a complete nuisance as a minority shareholder at the AGMs, holding up the floor with all types of silly, inane questions.