What is the market Journal?
The market journal shows, at a glance, a summary of the day’s activities on the GASCI stock exchange.

There are a lot of columns here – what do they all mean?
The market journal has a lot of information of use to investors and potential investors. The information can usefully be considered in two sections:

Unfilled orders
When someone places and order to buy or sell shares they can attach a limit price that is the highest price they are willing to pay to buy the shares or the lowest price they are willing to sell the shares at.

GASCI operates a consolidated limit order book, on which the registered brokers enter the amount and price of all limit orders if they can not fill them in house or on the trading floor.

At the end of day GASCI publishes a summary of the positions left on the book – that is unfilled orders which are available to trade against. GASCI publishes the following information on the market journal:

Best Bid:
The price of the outstanding order(s) to buy (bids) with the highest price attaching at the end of day’s trading activity.

Vol Bid (000s):
The total volume (in thousands of shares) of all outstanding orders to buy at the end of day’s trading activity. Note that some of these orders may be below the Best Bid price.

Best Offer
The price of the outstanding limit order(s) to sell (offers) with the lowest price attaching at the end of day’s trading activity.

Vol Off’d (000s):
The total volume (in thousands of shares) of all outstanding orders to sell at the end of day’s trading activity. Note that some of these orders may be above the Best Offer price.

What does this tell me!?
If you want to buy shares, the best offer gives you a good indication of the price you will have to pay to be fairly likely to pick up the shares (remember if there are more bids than the amount of shares on offer at the best price then the shares will go on a first come first served basis).

Similarly if you want to sell shares the best bid gives you an indication of the price you will get for them (though if there are more offers than the amount of bids at the best price then only those sellers who are first in line will get their shares away).

Of course, you can always put in a slighter lower bid than the best offer or slightly higher offer than the best bid in the hope that someone on the other side does the same thing and you meet at a price in the middle somewhere!

The volume bid and offered gives an idea of the degree of marketability – all other things being equal the stock with the higher number of bids and offers has more stock available to trade so there are more likely to be trades in it.

An imbalance between the volume bid and offered indicates that there is excess demand (if bids exceed offers) or supply (if offers exceed bids) which may put upward or downwards pressure on prices respectively since with excess demand buyers will have to outbid each offer for the scarce amount of stock on offer while with excess supply sellers will have to undercut each other to get the shares away to a limited number of buyers.

Finally the difference between the best bid and offer is called the spread. A low spread generally indicates that shares are marketable and frequent trading should be expected, while a large spread is an indication of unmarketable shares where there are infrequent trades (if any). Examples of stocks with small spreads are DIH and DDL – they have spreads of just a few points and have been the market leaders in terms of numbers of transactions and volumes. At the other extreme, SPL had a spread of $45 at one point – there has yet to be a trade on the exchange in this stock.

Trading Results
The rest of journal deals with trades which have taken place during the trading session. A buyer and seller agree on a price and agree to trade the shares, that is the seller agrees to transfers a number of shares into the buyer’s name in exchange for the consideration (the price times the number of shares)

Opening Price
The opening price is the closing price from the previous session, or if the Board has invoked a single price auction then the auction price. The closing price is defined as the last trade from the previous session.

MWAP
Market Weighted Average Price: The average price of trades throughout the day, weighted by the consideration in respect of each trade.

Low
The lowest price at which shares traded during the trading session.

High
The highest price at which shares traded during the trading session.

Last Trade
The price of the last trade of the day.

Last Trade Vol (000s)
The total number of shares (in thousands) traded in the last trade

Last Trade Date
If there was a trade this session then this is blank, otherwise the date the last shares were traded on.

Total Volume Traded (000s)
The total number of shares traded (in thousands) during the day.

What is the share price/market value of my shares?
It depends! In some dealer (quote) driven markets eg the UK Government Bond (Gilt) market, the market value is taken to be the mid point between the best bid and the best offer quoted. In large order driven markets eg the London Stock Exchange, the convention is to take the price of the last trade as the market value. However, in a small order driven market such as this one a single small transaction at the end of the day at a price well above or low the rest of day’s activity would severely distort the value based on this measure. So it may be more appropriate to take the MWAP, which is an average of the trade prices during the day which also gives more weight to the prices at which large transactions took place during the day. It is thus less susceptible to distortions from a small transaction at an anomalous price.

In any event if trading is very thin (few shares were traded) then this will give less credibility to any measure of market value.

I have seen the movement in US share prices shown on CNN – is there an equivalent figure for GASCI?
Yes, just take the last trade price and subtract the opening price to give the change in price on the day.

Where can I get the market journal?
The market journal can be viewed at the offices of GASCI at the end of the day’s activities and a hard copy is available for a nominal fee.

It is also published on this website www.gasci.com/results/current.htm, along with archives of the previous session’s journals.

What do the Mnemonics stand for?
This is a shorthand way of writing out the security name – instead of writing “Demerara Distillers Ltd, ordinary shares” we represent this with “DDL”. The mnemonics for the securities currently traded on the exchange are as follows (all are ordinary shares):