Bulk deals

How to read bulk deal data

A bulk deal is a disclosure obligation, not a signal. Because any client crossing 0.5% of a company's listed shares in a session must be reported by name, this dataset is one of the few places where an individual counterparty is visible at all — but visibility and meaning are different things.

Three things are worth holding in mind. First, you are reading it late: the deal happened in a session that has already closed, at a weighted average price the stock may have moved well past. Second, a large share of bulk-deal volume comes from market-making and arbitrage desks whose buying and selling roughly nets out — which is why the panels above rank by net direction over a window rather than by the size of any single trade. Third, the interesting pattern is repetition: one block is a trade, the same buyer returning to the same stock across several sessions is a position being built.

Bulk deals pair naturally with two other disclosure feeds: block deals, which capture large negotiated trades in the separate block window, and insider trading, where promoters and directors disclose trades in their own company. Where all three point the same way on the same stock, the story is at least consistent.

Common questions