High volume equity sale w/price lower than bid and ask. What is this?

External question — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Bernesto Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/123672 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. Can someone explain this sale below. First time I have seen this, and I don't understand what happened here. The stock is trading in the post market at $11.90 with normal volume for that time of day, and this one sale comes across for 38,886,200 shares at $11.72. It didn't affect anything. Is this some sort of ECN balancing or something?

External answer — Personal Finance Stack Exchange Author: Bob Baerker Original post: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/123678 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. The most basic explanation is that there was a buyer for that many shares when there was a seller for that many shares. When that occurs, price does not change. A more likely explanation is that it was a cross trade: A cross trade also occurs legitimately when a broker executes matched buy and a sell orders for the same security across different client accounts and reports them on an exchange. For example, if one client wants to sell and another wants to buy, the broker could match those two orders without sending the orders to the stock exchange to be filled but filling them as a cross trade and then reporting the transactions after the fact but in a timely manner and time-stamped with the time and price of the cross. These types of cross trades must also be executed at a price that corresponds to the prevailing market price at the time.