Trading Volume at Citigroup

If you ever want to check some insane numbers on Wall Street, look at trading volume for Citigroup ($C). This is the usually the most-traded stock each day. The trading volume isn’t just high, it’s amazingly high.

There are two main reasons for Citi’s huge volume. One is that the share price is low (currently $4.51, though it once was $57) and the other is that Citi has 29 billion shares outstanding. This makes Citi a favorite for day traders and high-frequency traders.

Average daily volume for Citi usually runs around 500 million shares. Since the financial crisis broke, Citi’s volume has topped one billion shares in a single day 60 times. Last December, when the government said it was ditching the last of its Citi stock, the total volume topped 3.2 billion in a single day. Over a trading day, that’s an average of 140,000 shares per second.

The trading bonanza must come to a close soon as Citi said it will have a 1-for-10 reverse stock split. This means that shareholders will have one-tenth as many shares but the price will increase by ten-fold.

I’ll be curious to see if trading volume drops by far more than one-tenth. I bet it will.

Posted by on April 6th, 2011 at 11:17 am


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